10 Best Movies To Watch After Chinatown (1974)
MaXXXine
It’s disappointing and fitting that director Ti West’s MaXXXine is undone by its sheer ambition. Throughout West’s licentious slasher series, his films have always featured titular heroines whose dreams were never commensurate with the limitations of their present circumstances (cue Mia Goth’s iconic “Please, I’m a star!” diatribe in 2022’s Pearl). In a similar vein, MaXXXine follows Maxine Minx (played once again by a show-stopping Goth) as she struggles to make a name for herself in Hollywood despite a less-than-savory past (for starters, she’s the sole survivor of a brutal massacre, as depicted in the first film of the series, X). Like its titular protagonist, MaXXXine has high ambitions, attempting to weave in commentary about the dignity of sex work, the glamor and exploitation of Hollywood, the soul-crushing dogmas of conservative Christianity, and the pitfalls of fame all while delivering bloody genre thrills. It’s an admirable attempt, but, unfortunately, that desire to cover so much thematic ground does a disservice to the film as a whole, ultimately rendering MaXXXine a sizzle reel of iconic 1980s set pieces in a desperate search for a more compelling story to thread them together. Taking place in 1985 and six(xx) years after X, the film follows Maxine as she carves a successful name for herself in the pornographic film industry. Still, she’s convinced that she’s meant for greater things, hoping to make the leap into non-stag films. She gets her big break when she lands the lead role in the horror film The Puritan II, but cannot rest on the laurels of her inchoate movie career. A serial killer known as the Night Stalker has been brutally murdering young LA hopefuls, and after three of the victims have a direct connection to Maxine, she realizes that her past has caught up with her. In between her blossoming movie career, she strives to stop the Night Stalker, lest her dreams are thwarted. Continue Reading →
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
Early on in the proceedings of the long-gestating Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, an actual Beverly Hills cop, looks over files chronicling Axel Foley’s previous visits to the city of glitz and glamor. The officer remarks, “94–not your finest year,” a clear shot at the dismal Beverly Hills Cop 3. Ironically, as bad as it was, 3 feels like a near-masterpiece compared to Axel F. This installment is a wheezy, depressing collection of franchise tropes that have long exhausted their comedic value. Eddie Murphy delivers one of the more listless performances in a career that has been, to put it politely, uneven. It somehow pulls off the seemingly impossible task of making Bad Boys: Ride or Die seem vital and cutting-edge. This time, our hero continues to cause chaos as a Detroit cop, chasing crooks through the streets in a snowplow in the opener. Almost immediately, he’s once again summoned to Beverly Hills when he learns that his estranged daughter Jane (Taylor Paige) is receiving death threats. As a defense lawyer, her current case, involving an accused cop killer and possible police corruption, has apparently upset some dangerous people. Axel teams up with Jane and her former flame, the honest cop Det. Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to investigate the threats. It isn’t exactly Chinatown in its complexity, though. The bad guy, corrupt top cop Capt. Grant (Kevin Bacon) essentially announces his villainy the minute he appears. Cue the alleged wackiness. Villain or not, Kevin Bacon has that jawline. (Netflix) The original Beverly Hills Cop was not a particularly great film, an often-uneasy fusion of violent cop thriller and comedy. But it did effectively milk its basic fish-out-of-water premise with a just ascending to superstar status Murphy. At this point, however, that premise has long since been milked dry. Former outsider Axel is now such a fixture in these posh surroundings that I suspect there’s a sandwich named after him at Nate’N Al’s. Continue Reading →
Love Lies Bleeding
The word for Rose Glass (Saint Maud) and Weronika Tofilska's Love Lies Bleeding is "precise." From the individual and combined performances of leads Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian (whose turn as a cunning Imperial agent was a bright spot in the often dreary third season of The Mandalorian) to DP Ben Fordesman's chameleonic camera work and hair department lead Megan Daum's wide-ranging design work, everyone on the project knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to get it done. The result is a bracing, clear-eyed noir thriller, and a fraught, swoon-worthy romance. It's my favorite movie of 2024 so far. It's the late 1980s. The reserved and insightful Lou (Stewart) manages a grimy bodybuilding gym in a sunbleached western suburb. She does not talk to her father, the cruel, cunning crime lord Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). She loves her sister, fraying housewife Beth (Jena Malone), and hates that she will not leave her loathsome slimeball husband JJ (Dave Franco). The closest person Lou has to a romantic partner is the aggressively cheerful Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), and their on-off something or other boils down to, in Bart Simpson's words, "geographical convenience, really." Enter Jackie (O'Brian), a drifting bodybuilder aiming for a Las Vegas contest where victory can leap passion into profession. The sparks are immediate. Jackie (Katy O'Brian) strives for bodybuilding stardom. She's doing the work, but the events of Love Lies Bleeding bend the barrier between her reality and her dream. A24. Jackie's drive lights a fire in Lou, and Lou's methodical care grounds Jackie. Simultaneously, Lou's desire to help Jackie achieve her dream and Jackie's desire to make Lou happy lead them to make bad calls—the sort of bad calls that lead to worse calls that lead to blood. And neither JJ's venality nor Lou Sr.'s mercilessness should be discounted. Continue Reading →
Inspector Sun y la maldición de la viuda negra
I love detective stories. Tales of how, as Sara Gran would say, "truth lives in the ether." Explorations of people and places and how they shape each other. The journey down the streets towards a hidden truth. Dennis Lehane's Darkness, Take My Hand, is my favorite book. Rian Johnson's Brick and Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone are movies I think the world of, never mind all-timers like Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye. And, of course, the immortal Who Framed Roger Rabbit? from Robert Zemeckis. Any time there's a new detective film, whether it be an affably bleak comedy or an action-driven character study, it's a treat. Continue Reading →
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 →
The Pope's Exorcist
If you like loud noise jump scares, you’re going to love The Exorcist: Believer. Continue Reading →
Fair Play
Fair Play is all about the rules of engagement—in business, in bed, in relationships—and the chaos that ensues when someone who lives and dies by those rules suspects his partner is breaking them. However, it isn’t the fairness of the righteous or the just she’s violating. No, it is the unwritten rules he believes everyone should play the game by. Continue Reading →
To Live and Die in L.A.
It must have been easy to be cynical about William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. in 1985. After a blazing hot early 1970s, his critical and popular reputation bottomed out with four straight disappointments. So, it makes sense that someone might think Friedkin’s return to the cop-on-the-edge genre was a purely commercial decision, a hope to rekindle the fire he lit in 1971 with The French Connection. After all, that movie was both a commercial and critical smash. Continue Reading →
A Haunting in Venice
The first two entries in director/actor Kenneth Branagh’s foray into Agatha Christie adaptation lost the magic of the English writer’s mysteries. With his third attempt, A Haunting in Venice, Branagh decides to make considerable changes to the story. Using the bones of Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, writer Michael Green changes the setting from a small town in the English countryside to a palazzo in Venice. Branagh emphasizes the gothic elements of Christie’s story, leaning on the horror of the location, the manic nature of the children’s Halloween party, and the gruesome moments before and after an unexpected death. Continue Reading →
Marlowe
I love mysteries and crime stories. And it's been a treat these past few years to have so many good detective stories on television (Under the Banner of Heaven, for instance) and in cinemas (Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc mysteries, the quite charming Confess, Fletch). Would that I could count Neil Jordan's Marlowe among them. I cannot. It's a bad movie, and bad in a very frustrating fashion—no one's phoning it in, but nothing connects outside of a few stray moments save for David Holmes' no-disclaimers excellent score. Continue Reading →