5 Best Movies To Watch After Escape from Sobibor (1987)
Killer Joe
Upon the news of the passing of William Friedkin, every headline reporting on the news focused on two films. It’s not surprising that the media spent so much time talking about The French Connection and The Exorcist, two bona fide masterpieces that paved the way for a new era of American filmmaking. What was disappointing was this seeming willingness to reduce a cinematic legend’s legacy to a burst of time in the early 1970s, thus dismissing the five decades that followed as either negligible or outright unworthy of interest. Continue Reading →
Sayen: La cazadora
At the risk of making a "getting a lot of Sorcerer vibes from this" guy out of myself, The Hunted—William Friedkin's 2003 old-master-hunts-rogue-student thriller really does make for a fascinating counterpart to his earlier men-on-a-desperate-mission masterwork. Both delve into the lives of damaged, forlorn, isolated men on perilous quests for deliverance. And both of those quests lead deep into madness. Both pointedly contrast man-made, flame-choked hellscapes (Sorcerer's exploding oil well, The Hunted's secret mission amidst the Kosovo War) with the vast, amoral green of the deep forest (Columbia and Oregon, respectively). Both turn on setpieces that thrill while maintaining a grounded (if not necessarily "realistic") feel and weave surreality in with care. Continue Reading →
Stoker
There's more than one transition going on in Park Chan-wook's 2013 thriller Stoker. Yes, the film tells the story of how the seemingly carefree India (Mia Wasikowska) goes from worshipping her father to worshipping her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode). But the Hitchcockian thriller -- and it is one, beyond the shadow of a doubt -- was also Director Park’s first English-language title. Continue Reading →
Kill List
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →
Halloween Kills
With the release of The Rise of Skywalker and the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the term “fan service” has come to mean going to extremes in order to please fickle audiences of a TV series or film franchise. Though framed as an acknowledgment and appreciation of fan support, it feels forced and phony, an Easter egg hunt where a plot should be. While David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s 2018 reboot of Halloween was far from a perfect film, they were determined to make it their own, rather than continuing the same interminable, by then thoroughly ridiculous storyline. Its sequel, Halloween Kills, however, feels like whatever Green and McBride were originally trying to do was shoved aside in favor of winks and nods at the “true” fans of the series. The body count is much, much bigger, and almost laughably gory, but if you’re looking for any kind of coherent plot and characters not doing anything but the stupidest things imaginable, look elsewhere. Continue Reading →