20 Best Movies To Watch After Rope (1948)
Killers of the Flower Moon
To talk about The Killer is to strip away pretense. Well, one can try. Cold it may be, but David Fincher's latest is an incredibly open film. The houses are made of glass; the windows are ceiling-high; the voiceovers from the title character (Michael Fassbender) give infallible insight into his worldview. The film is his worldview, simple in its machinations and complex in its philosophy. In most other circumstances, this would unfold over time. And it does here, at least to an extent. Continue Reading →
Saltburn
With her first film, Promising Young Woman, writer-director Emerald Fennell took a storyline that was essentially a cloddish-but-glossy retread of such female-driven revenge sagas as Ms .45 and I Spit on Your Grave, infused it with insights regarding gender issues that would barely have passed muster in a 100-level college class and somehow rode it to inexplicable praise and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Continue Reading →
Jade
After the aggressively negative critic and audience response to 1980’s Cruising, William Friedkin took a curious “hell with it, I’m going to do whatever I want” approach to projects. None of what he directed over the next decade, save for To Live and Die in L.A., came close to receiving the kind of acclaim his early 70s career did. If anything, it seemed as though he had given up his precise, occasionally unreasonable eye for perfection in favor of churning out the most generic cable-friendly nonsense possible. Continue Reading →
So I Married an Axe Murderer
If anyone should be ripe for a huge comeback any minute now, it’s Mike Myers. Myers is largely responsible for two of the most iconic comedies of the 90s, Wayne’s World and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. If you weren’t there and cognizant of it then, it’s impossible to explain the grip both movies had on 90s pop culture, particularly Austin Powers. Even now, 25 years later, it’s very likely that you’ll occasionally hear someone say “One hundred…billion…DOLLARS” in the voice of Dr. Evil, or refer to a person’s lookalike child as their “Mini-Me.” Its closest competitor in the zeitgeist is probably Clueless, and Clueless didn’t get two sequels. Continue Reading →
Spoiler Alert
While they say that love is eternal, eventually, even the greatest of love stories come to an end. Marriage vows foretell the reality of “to death do us part.” It’s an inevitability rarely explored in cinema, and even then, only in schmaltzy melodramatic weepers. Fortunately, Michael Showalter’s Spoiler Alert is free of schmaltz. Instead, the film deftly explores the process of a couple dealing with a terminal illness amid all the usual messiness of a real relationship. Continue Reading →
The Inspection
The Inspection, the narrative feature debut of writer-director Elegance Bratton, aims to be a fictionalized treatment of Bratton’s own real-life experiences as a young gay Black man attempting to turn his life around by, of all things, joining the Marines. As dramatic hooks go, that’s a compelling one, but the finished film seems strangely unwilling to grapple with it in any meaningful way. Instead, what could have been a unique, deeply personal narrative is eventually reduced to a well-meaning but largely undistinguished military melodrama that is ultimately too familiar for its own good. Continue Reading →
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Chicago International Film Festival) Continue Reading →
God's Own Country
God’s Country shows a place in America rarely described. There’s a vastness, an emptiness to Sandra Guidry’s (Thandiwe Newton) home. She’s moved from New Orleans out to the country. It’s the sort of place where a single man in law enforcement covers hundreds of miles of terrain. A Black professor in an all-white department at a local university, Guidry lives in her house alone on acres of land, prime hunting ground for those hoping to shoot and score. Julian Higgins’s thriller plays out like a matchstick, a burn that erodes everything until there’s nothing left to destroy. 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 →
Brazen
With the meteoric popularity of Yellowjackets, a new installment of the Scream franchise, and the revival of shows like Saved by the Bell and The Babysitters Club, 90’s nostalgia is in full swing. It was only a matter of time before the true entertainment staple of the era made a comeback as well. I’m talking of course about the humble made-for-tv movie. The original TV movies of the 80’s and 90’s came in four basic flavors: teen morality play, hardboiled sleaze, young women being kidnapped/stalked/unalived, and Stephen King. The very best made-for-tv movies had overlap between the categories, with classics like Cyber Seduction, A Friend To Die For: Death of a Cheerleader, and No One Would Tell fueling the Monday morning water cooler roundups. Continue Reading →
The Power of the Dog
Contains spoilers about The Power of the Dog (read our spoiler-free review here) Continue Reading →
Swan Song
When someone tells you they never lie to their romantic partner, don’t believe them. They may not tell real whoppers, like what they really did with the money that was supposed to go towards bills, but little white lies, and especially lies of omission, are fair game. Total honesty means having to hurt the people we love, and so we obfuscate, hide things, to protect their feelings. Benjamin Cleary’s Swan Song (not to be confused with the Todd Stephens film of the same name) tells the story of a husband and father who takes a lie of omission to eerie, heart-wrenching lengths. Continue Reading →
West Side Story
While audiences and critics often bemoan the plethora of sequels and remakes that litter the media landscape, retelling a familiar story isn’t inherently bad. After all, Shakespeare’s most famous play, Romeo and Juliet, was based on earlier works, and in 1957 playwright Arthur Laurents (along with composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim) adapted the tale into West Side Story, which Robert Wise turned into a classic musical in 1961. Sixty years later, Steven Spielberg has thrown his hat into the ring with a new adaptation of the material. But can he make a familiar plot relevant to the 21st century? Continue Reading →
Firebird
(This review is part of our 2021 coverage of Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival./) Continue Reading →
Annette
As if chomping at the bit to show its true self, Annette immediately disrobes. Director Leos Carax, off-screen during the opening credits, tells the audience to stay silent. Audio tracks spray over shots of Los Angeles and, in a studio, he asks his musicians, “So, may we start?” He’s now speaking not to us but Ron Mael and Russell Mael of Sparks. Both of them share a story by credit, the latter having written the screenplay, and already, the film has dived feet first into its own joke. But Carax’s latest doesn’t just strip itself naked. It takes off its own skin, as a rock opera and as a movie. Continue Reading →
The Forever Purge
The Purge franchise, spanning five films and a now-canceled two-season television series, was never one to traffic in nuance or subtlety, or even optimism. Its premise is born of a kind of didactic, Shirley Jackson-esque thought experiment: what if all crimes, even murder, were legal for 12 hours? How would people react, and who would they become, when they could let out their raging ids just for a night? From its second film, the Carpenter-esque The Purge: Anarchy, series creator James DeMonaco tacked on a third question: What if *gasp* the rich and powerful were just using the Purge as a means to cull the poor, the marginalized, and nonwhite? Continue Reading →
Potato Dreams of America
(This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) As vaccinations soar, stimulus payments go through, and studios seem a bit more eager to get people back in theaters, it feels as though the days of COVID-era film consumption are drawing to a middle. To that end, I wonder if we'll miss the unfettered access and pyjama-based marathons virtual film festivals have allowed us. One hopes they'll stick around, given that virtual fests allow more and more people to access these small, independent films that could use all the eyes and exposure they can get. The 2020 SXSW Film Festival was the first to go virtual (and The Spool was one of the few outlets to continue to cover those entries!), so it's fitting that we've come full circle in 2021 with a more full-fledged virtual fest. Keep an eye out at The Spool for dispatches on the major categories and full reviews of the festival's three headliners; in the meantime, let's dig through Day 1's offerings of the fest's Narrative Feature Competition. Continue Reading →