11 Best Movies To Watch After Out of the Past (1947)

Jeremy Saulnier’s films, even his darkly comedic debut Murder Party, are shot through with a resigned skepticism about violence. The characters who willingly pursue it as a solution, even a protagonist like Blue Ruin’s Dwight (Macon Blair), suffer for it. However, those who try to resist, from Murder Party’s Christopher (Chris Sharp) or the band members in Green Room, find they have no choice but to wield it. Even then, that inevitability rarely brings relief or catharsis. Violence might get them out of a dangerous situation or safely back home, but it leaves psychological scars. Rebel Ridge continues this tradition. Not that Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) doesn’t have plenty of good reasons to embrace violence. Within moments of arriving in a small town, he’s knocked off his bike by a cop car driven by Officers Marston (David Denman) and Lann (Emory Cohen). They’re white, he’s not. It’s easy to jump to conclusions about what’s about to happen. Despite their obvious racist stereotyping of him, however, they ultimately let him go. Unfortunately, before they do so, they strip him of the money he was carrying to bail his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc) out of lock-up on a low-level drug charge. It’s a very real process called civil asset forfeiture, which gives law officers tremendous power to seize money and assets from anyone they suspect of being involved in the drug trade. Worse, those who find their assets seized have little recourse. This town’s police chief, Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), has happily taken advantage of it to make up for what he considers unfair restrictions to his budget. It’s police corruption at its most resilient. Continue Reading →

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 →

The biggest challenge any director making an exorcism movie faces is: How do you top The Exorcist? William Friedkin's apocalyptic, daring 1974 classic defined the genre so thoroughly that any subsequent entry is both indebted to, and haunted by, its mastery. The smartest move, really, is to just embrace its fog-covered shadow; The Exorcism, a meta-textual possession film that swims happily in the iconography of its forebear. In so doing it comes away with surprisingly melancholic ruminations on the strain that came with, well, making The Exorcist. The film is co-written and directed by Joshua John Miller (Final Girls), whose most direct connection to The Exorcist comes from being the son of Jason Miller, the actor who played Father Karras in Friedkin's original. In a way, this story feels like Miller exorcising demons of his own, likely spurred by watching the emotional toll his father experienced working on Friedkin's famously chaotic and unpredictable set back in 1974. Here, the timeline is moved to the present, where a film called The Georgetown Project (a nod to the town in which The Exorcist is set) is put on hold after the actor playing the priest (a brief turn from Adrian Pasdar) meets a grisly fate late one night in the film's doll-house like soundstage. In desperation, the film's director (Adam Goldberg) turns to Anthony Miller (Russell Crowe), a washed-up movie star freshly sober and looking for his way back into the spotlight. In an early scene of confession -- a perpetually useful device for Catholic-flavored exposition -- we learn that Miller is a lapsed Catholic whose life has been haunted by childhood sexual abuse as an altar boy. This itself rippled out into drug and alcohol problems and a strained relationship with his daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins), who comes home after washing out of college just in time for Miller to contemplate a return to screen. Continue Reading →

Thomasin McKenzie & Anne Hathaway burn up the screen in William Oldroyd’s unsettling thriller. Eileen will likely be lost in the holiday season shuffle among such spectacles as the upcoming Wonka and awards-friendly fare like Ferrari. On the other hand, it’s unclear under what circumstances Eileen would make a big splash. It’s an odd, occasionally off-putting little film that wouldn’t work as well as it does if not for the scorching chemistry between its two leads. Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s (also odd and occasionally off-putting) novel of the same name, Eileen stars Thomasin McKenzie as the titular character, a lonely young woman stuck in a miserable rut. Living in the most depressing town in Massachusetts circa 1964, Eileen is forced to take care of her alcoholic, mean-spirited father (a chilling Shea Whigham, still somehow not one of Hollywood’s biggest stars), a former cop who’s taken to waving his gun at their neighbors. Working as a secretary at a juvenile detention center, though she’s in her twenties she comes off as someone much younger, a meek and awkward child merely dressing up as an adult. Eileen also has a child’s taste for doing things like ignoring her hygiene, stuffing herself with candy, and compulsively masturbating, while maintaining a rich fantasy life involving rough sex with a detention center guard, or murdering her father. Her boredom has reached pathological levels. Continue Reading →

Serve up this bizarre, oddly funny 80s slasher as part of your holiday entertainment feast this year. Though Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s retro horror double feature Grindhouse met with audience indifference, the collection of fake movie trailers during its “intermission” became amusing pop culture ephemera. Of the four featured, Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” is probably the most fun to revisit, mostly because of its loving dedication to capturing the unique seediness of an 80s slasher film. There’s something so familiar about the murky film quality, the low budget special effects, the incoherent plot (it appears to be a trailer for two different, unfinished movies stuck together, as was the case for many 80s horror movies), the glimpses of T&A, and of course, that hilarious voiceover and excellent tagline, that it seems unbelievable that it hadn’t actually already been made. Though it took over 15 years, Thanksgiving is finally a full-length feature, released to largely positive reviews just last weekend. It is not, however, as has been claimed elsewhere, the first Thanksgiving slasher film. Before that, there was 1987’s Blood Rage, a movie that leans into all the best and worst tropes of its genre, while also being deeply strange and often undeniably funny. Continue Reading →

Long overshadowed by Sideways, we’re giving this understated dramedy its due for depicting Midwest with the specificity Hollywood rarely gives it. Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is as unassuming as the regular Midwestern folk it depicts. Even though this small, quiet, black-and-white comedy was flooded with nominations during the 2013 awards season it won almost none of them. Ten years on, it remains overshadowed by Payne’s more popular works like Sideways and Election. But this odd little dramedy is not only one of Payne’s finest films to date, it’s also his one true love letter to his home state of Nebraska and the Midwest itself. Elderly alcoholic Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) has fallen for a Publisher’s Clearinghouse–style scam and is convinced he’s won a million dollars. Determined to collect the cash in person, son David (Will Forte) ignores his mother and brother’s pleas and agrees to drive him all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska. On the way, the pair get waylaid in Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne, giving David a glimpse of not just who his father is, but how a place and the people in it shaped him. Continue Reading →

Thinking about getting into the Saw franchise 10 movies in? Here’s what you need to know. This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn't exist. With an inevitability that is oddly comforting in such a scary and uncertain time, a new Saw movie is coming out at the end of this week. As you could assume by the “X,” Saw X is the tenth film in a franchise that, just based on its lack of continuity alone, could conceivably continue for the next three decades or so. If you’re thinking about now, after all this time, finally getting into the Saw franchise, here are a few tips to aid you in your journey towards redemption by way of giant bear traps clamping down on one’s skull. Continue Reading →

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 →

“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” So begins Daphne du Maurier’s gothic masterwork Rebecca, one of the most famous opening lines in fiction. Rebecca proved a hit upon release in 1938 and has remained in print ever since. Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation, coming just two years later, netted him his first Best Director nomination. That interpretation of the text has come to be considered a classic, and with good reason. Its misty black-and-white photography and mysteries hypnotize.  Continue Reading →

Gather around, children, and let Auntie Gena tell you a story about days gone by. Long ago, up till around 1984, kids used to run free in the streets from dawn till dusk, with virtually no adult supervision. Was it a better time? Not really, just different, and it all came to an end with the collective belief that bad things happen to children who aren’t carefully watched at all times. Now it’s swung so far in the other direction that allowing your children to walk themselves to school may result in a visit from child protective services. Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone takes place in the time before, when parents didn’t worry about monsters until they were almost under their noses. Continue Reading →

In February 2017, Kim Jon-sam, the brother of Kim Jong-un, was walking through a Malaysian airport. Preparing for a flight back home to China, Jon-sam was suddenly hit with a substance by two women. Shortly after, Jon-sam developed a limp, went unconscious, and was dead within an hour. The brother of North Korea’s leader had died through exposure to a nerve agent called VX, one of the deadliest toxins on the planet. Continue Reading →