• Tekkonkinkreet

    Tekkonkinkreet

    ★★★½

    It is a strange, strange thing to watch this movie just after I finished reading the manga off which it was based, finally back in print. The movie adaptation is clearly made by people who love the manga, lavishly devoted to the source material to such an extent that the script frequently pulls directly from the manga. It is a deeply faithful adaptation in the most literal sense, trying to capture and condense a 600 page story in a little…

  • Twilight

    Twilight

    ★★★★★

    Watched while cooked by Covid at 4 in the morning, which is both acutely fitting for a Eastern European nightmare about murdered children, the flitting mass of an unseen, hungry, lecherous giant, a policeman desperate for justice and answers in the wake of eternity, all lost in the forest, devoured by the fog. I’m too delirious and in pain to give this as incisive a dissection as this black hole of a film deserves, I’ll have to watch it again,…

  • The Company of Wolves

    The Company of Wolves

    ★★★½

    “Never trust a priest— they don’t call them Father for nothing.”

    Narratively inconsistent and sometimes too story within a story for its own good, but the atmosphere, nasty practical effects, and the striking but all too infrequent use of surrealism elevate it into something more interesting than just another grim fairytale for grownups (tho it absolutely is that). The ending kinda whiffs it on its central metaphor (the same metaphor as every Red Riding Hood story: never trust a man)…

  • Space Is the Place

    Space Is the Place

    ★★★★

    A really excellent write-up about this movie and the concept of afrofuturism as a whole that is far more insightful and relevant than anything I have to say:
    boxd.it/1TPiHn

    One of the most gorgeous looking movies of all time, the colors and production design go unbelievably hard. A seminal audiovisual text of the 70s and for afrofuturism as a genre and medium. You can feel its influence across so many works of the last 50 years, both within afrofuturism and…

  • The Stroll

    The Stroll

    ★★★★½

    Makes me so fucking happy seeing Black Trans Sex Workers telling their own stories, filled with as much joy as pain, and getting to see (too few of) them achieve so much in the face of everything.

    Cried a bunch during this one, both tears of sadness at everything the girls relay of their experiences on The Stroll and tears of joy about the community and joy these girls cultivate with each other. The kind of movie that makes me…

  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

    ★★★★½

    We used to be a proper country, we used to rev up a bunch of fuckin’ maniacs in front of a camera and let them run loose, capturing the circus of carnage left in their wake. A masterpiece in the exact opposite direction of the original.

  • The Marvels

    The Marvels

    ★★½

    The story and character arcs are hacked to pieces and it’s kinda nothing but it’s fun and charming in a head empty sort of way. It’s nice to see some actual chemistry among the leads and a real effort to try something a little different here without as much MCU baggage, an actual earnestness that mostly eschews the Whedon-esque ironic detachment shit that makes me a lot more charitable towards it even when it’s objectively not a very good movie.

    Ms. Marvel and Goose the real MVPs

  • May December

    May December

    ★★★★★

    This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

    Never shoulda smoked that shit, now I’m on the roof recognizing my childhood was stolen from me by my wife, whose childhood was stolen from her, that we are trapped in a lineage of generational rape like the home that we built together from the ashes of our stolen lives, that only I can break this cycle of pedophilia and denial but I can’t tell if we’re bonding or if this will be a bad memory, if this is just…

  • Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

    Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

    ★★★★

    This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

    Shin Scott Pilgrim

    The rare and special kind of reboot that couldn’t exist without the original, remixing the series into something completely new while recontextualizing everything that came before (particularly the movie) in the text and metatext. By letting Scott Pilgrim go, it lets everything and everyone else flourish in his absence. And while I enjoyed what they did with Scott’s return to the narrative in the last quarter, I think the show missed a golden opportunity to truly let…

  • The Astro-Zombies

    The Astro-Zombies

    Too much cunt was served for a movie this terrible

  • Suicide Club

    Suicide Club

    ★★★½

    Either unfortunate proof that old men yelling at clouds can make good art or an incisive look at how the internet and fandom culture flay some us from ourselves, connected only to others in our alienation. Either way, Sion Sono films the hell out of it. I don’t know that I’d call it transgressive, exactly, perhaps cringe or inconsistent, but I’d certainly say Sono got something right about the incalculable damage the psychosis incubator of the Internet did to our brains

    Deeply conflicted! Great filmmaking and score for sure

  • A Short Story

    A Short Story

    ★★★★

    Bi Gan’s craft with a camera is simply unreal, actively astonishing to watch unfold moment by moment. Genuinely one of the best looking movies I’ve ever see.