Letterboxd — Your life in film

Welcome to 1988 LA! We've got pools, surfers, bikinis, fitness videos, neon lights, makeovers, two-inch acrylic nails, a fluffy white cat, and a phone shaped like a duck. Plot? You're asking about plot? Let me explain: this is pure bimbo/himbo cinema, complete with cheery synthpop songs entitled "Cause I'm a Blonde" and "I Like 'em Big and Stupid." This is a movie where aliens learn English by channel surfing and seduce women by parroting advertising slogans. This is a movie…

You could view Citizen Ruth through the tiresome centrist lens of "both sides do it," but I prefer to see it as a darkly satirical examination of how ordinary people exercise power. Ruth Stoops is lost and chaotic, and everyone who finds her also wants to order her, to discipline her into something more stable and assimilable. No matter whether their preferred order is a religious-right cult, a New Agey lesbian activist collective, or the iron hand of the state,…

Note: this film contains multiple scenes of flashing strobe lights.

I set out to find something goth to watch, and Night of the Demon certainly delivered, from the Halloweeny animated opening credits, to the propulsive industrial synth score, to the infamous scene where a girl dressed like Siouxsie Sioux dances rapturously to Bauhaus's "Stigmata Martyr." In terms of genre, the movie blends the haunted-house setting (though our doomy hostess would remind us that it's actually a possessed house) with the…

Presumably trying to capitalize on the immense success of Singin' in the Rain a year earlier, I Love Melvin brings Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor back minus Gene Kelly (although plus three men in identical plastic Gene Kelly masks). What these two are able to do with their bodies never ceases to amaze me, from O'Connor's tap-dancing on rollerskates to Reynold's acrobatic leaps as — yes, it's that movie — the football in a sports-themed number. Lyricist Mack Gordon is…

From Night of the Hunter to Eye of the Needle, you've got to love a thriller where the protagonist knows the villain but doesn't know that they're the villain. Typically the plots of these movies break down into three sections, delineated by who knows what when. In the first, the protagonist is still in the dark. In the second, the protagonist has figured out who the villain is, but they have to pretend that they're none the wiser for their…

I guess "journey to a small secluded village where Things Are Not What They Seem" is a pretty universal concept, huh? Impetigore follows a pretty well-trod path through the spooky woods, enough so that very little of it actually scared me, but it does so with some beautiful colors and a fair amount of panache, especially in the extended flashback sequence toward the end. Like The Wicker Man, it's not immediately obvious whether the takeaway is supposed to be "oh…