9 Best Movies To Watch After The Island (2005)
The Purge: Election Year
When The Purge film series began, it attempted to create a heightened, ultraviolent version of the future that was both laughably over-the-top and an accurate reflection of the current political climes. They created a dystopia that was vaguely familiar but could still leave you rolling your eyes at its implausibility. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, the concept is as follows: On one night each year, the US government legalizes all crime, including murder, in the hopes of providing an outlet for Americans’ rage. It ultimately leads to an overall decrease in crime and an (ostensibly) utopian society. Continue Reading →
Infinity Pool
Brandon Cronenberg & Chloe Domont direct stylish films about sex & violence among the bourgeoise wealthy. A growing trend in Hollywood film & TV of late has been to put a mirror in front of the idle rich and mock the privileged and avaricious lifestyles they live. Some may say this is happening now because of honest self-reflection in the face of growing and untenable wealth-inequality in this country, but that just sounds gullible to me. It’s probably more so that hedonistic and openly, publicly vapid displays of self-promotion and consumerist propaganda through social media has made it easier to become famous and sponsored by doing less than ever before. Brandon Cronenberg probably has imposter syndrome. In Infinity Pool, his central character James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) is a writer plagued by a lack of inspiration and haunted by a review that boils his career down to only having a rich father-in-law, which affords him the luxury of not needing a real job. His hang-up over this connection through his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), explodes in the open when they have a fight and he tells her to “run back to Daddy.” In formally and thematically finding a voice unto himself apart from his lineage, the younger Cronenberg has cultivated a filmography where the corporeal form is at odds with the sense of identity. His characters constantly feel like empty vessels and thus, the trauma their bodies endure are more a dissociative terror than a deeply internally felt one. Continue Reading →
정이
What would you do to know your parents? Not just as parents, but as people—even long after their deaths? How would you make the most of a horrendous moral quagmire you had no choice in getting dragged into—and what would you do when that quagmire, for all its familiarity, finally became too much to bear? On a broader level, what makes us human—and what remains when we're gone? Director/writer Yeon Sang-ho asks and answers these questions in his out-now-on-Netflix science fiction film JUNG_E. It's a solid, thoughtful film that shines thanks to its leading trio and Sang-ho's skill at depicting and delving into the uncanny. Continue Reading →
Crimes of the Future
As Marvel holds its iron grip on theaters, and Netflix seems determined to focus its dwindling profits on churning out generic action movies starring various iterations of Ryan Reynolds, cineastes lament the loss of “art” films, those outliers that, whether good or bad, generate far more lively after-movie conversation than Spider-Man ever could. And yet, right now we seem to be in the middle of a weird movie renaissance. We have the joyful weirdness of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the all too topical weirdness of Alex Garland’s Men, and the over the top spectacle weirdness of Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis. What better time could there be for David Cronenberg to come roaring back to form with some body horror weirdness in Crimes of the Future? Continue Reading →
Dual
The latest from oddball extraordinaire Riley Stearns is a sci-fi curio about scrambling to find your will to live. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) Writer/director Riley Stearns introduces the viewer to the offbeat world of Dual through something of a Hunger Games or Twilight Zone knock-off, with a bloody duel between two men who look exactly the same as an audience watches. It’s a smart and captivating start, one flooded with Sterns’ usual dark sense of humor, and one that introduces the core premise succinctly: in a world where you and your double both want to live, how willing and able are you to survive a duel to the death? Continue Reading →
The Matrix Resurrections
It's hard to overstate just how seismic The Matrix was when it was first released in 1999. Looking back on it now, in an age of focus-tested corporate franchises, extended universes, and an even more top-heavy IP landscape than we had back then, it feels positively revolutionary. Even in its imperfect but-radically-reappraised 2003 sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, filmmakers Lana and Lilly Wachowski manage to build a world that's at once evocative of so many of its influences (cyberpunk, bullet opera, kung fu film, Star Wars) but feels highly original. And what's more, is unafraid to tackle challenging, often heady psychological questions while still revolutionizing the way action movies were made. Continue Reading →
Dune
When I first heard the announcement of a new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s magnum opus Dune, I think I might have groaned and said, “God, not again.” Even with the cult followings that Lynch’s now-disowned 1984 version and SyFy’s plodding 2000 miniseries have amassed, there has yet to be a version that had the kind of mass appeal that gets butts in seats. Continue Reading →
シン・エヴァンゲリオン劇場版:||
Let me start by saying this: Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time is the best film I have seen in 2021 so far. It's a gorgeously animated conclusion to one of 20th and 21st-century science fiction's great works. It executes both its quiet, still moments and its grand setpieces with care and precision. The voice cast (who have been playing these roles for decades, going back to the original 1995 television series Neon Genesis Evangelion) and the animation team give the cast an excellently detailed life and liveliness. 3.0+1.0's editing—particularly during its extended, tone-jumping climax—is downright sublime. The imagery? To paraphrase Sam Peckinpah, I will not be forgetting what I've seen in Evangelion 3.0+1.0 any time soon. I do not think I could. From a ruined piece of pre-Impact infrastructure twirling in a patch of broken gravity to one of the titular gargantuan combat androids going to work on a swarm of bizarre, disturbing opponents, it's indelible. Whether familiar or bizarre, beautiful or horrifying, 3.0+1.0's imagery is, without fail, flabbergasting. Continue Reading →
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
Just a few days after he passed, it was clear that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 would be Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final film. Back in 2012, Lionsgate made the financial decision to milk a fourth movie out of the Hunger Games trilogy, keeping their cash cow going until November 2015. While Catching Fire made for a worthwhile outing in its own right, the back half of the series does its best to annihilate any goodwill it’d accumulated. Continue Reading →