8 Best Movies To Watch After The Flock (2007)

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 →

What is Horizon? It's a question that plagues the sprawling cast of characters in Kevin Costner's new Western saga, his return to feature filmmaking after staking out a healthy retirement fund (and keeping himself in the public eye of America's dads) with five seasons on Paramount's popular neo-Western soap Yellowstone. Most of them, one way or another, have been drawn West with the promise of prosperity thanks to mysterious flyers published nationwide; settlers, homesteaders, and forty-niners all rush out there to find their future and their fortune. But, as with so many tales of the frontier, down this way lies danger: Apaches, privateers, the shadows of your past following you into the unknown seeking vengeance. Horizon, it seems, is the intangible dream of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, the romantic core of this nation's history (and the brutal underbelly of violence that created it). But it's also important to ask what Horizon is for Costner, especially in the context of this first chapter: Part 1, a three-hour prologue that sets up what could be up to three chapters to come but which gives audiences little to grab onto in that lengthy time period. Much like Dune: Part One before it, it's hard to gauge a film's merits when its story is incomplete by its very nature. Comparisons to "How the West Was Won" have been made, but it also evokes the epic miniseries events of the 1970s and 1980s like Lonesome Dove and The Blue and the Grey, multi-night appointment viewing that told novelistic stories with lavish production values. "Horizon" most echoes these in its structure, a TV-etic format that seems oddly fitting for Costner's return to film after so much time in the TV landscape himself. But Part 1's greatest asset (and hurdle) comes from its opening act, the inciting incident for much of the plot's primary thrust. 1859, the San Pedro Valley; a group of settlers put down stakes and form a small tent city, complete with loving families and even a bustling dance hall. Tragically, this bliss is interrupted by a raiding party of Apaches, angry at the "white-eyes" stealing their land, a forty-minute sequence as brutal as it is terrifying. This is the Costner of Dances With Wolves, in all its power and old-fashioned attitudes: scenes full of Western grandeur, yet suffused with an exoticism of Native peoples that hasn't quite updated to the modern day. Continue Reading →

Throughout such films as Shotgun Stories (2007), Take Shelter (2011), Mud (2012), Midnight Special (2016), and Loving (2016), writer-director Jeff Nichols has shown himself to be a filmmaker particularly fascinated with telling tales of people living on the fringes of society. On the surface, his latest effort, the long-delayed The Bikeriders, would seem to be an ideal use of his particular talents. But that makes the failures of the structurally confused, dramatically inert, and ultimately meandering project seem all the more baffling. Loosely inspired by the work of photographer Danny Lyon, who embedded himself with the Chicago chapter of the Outlaw Motorcycle Club for over a year and chronicled it in the influential 1968 book The Bikeriders, the film charts the development and growth of the Vandals, a motorcycle gang led by Johnny (Tom Hardy). He's an ordinary suburban Chicago family man with a job as a trucker who is nevertheless compelled to form the gang after watching The Wild One on TV. (Good thing he wasn’t watching Guys and Dolls instead.) Soon, he collects a number of like-minded guys who seem to spend all their time riding, working on their bikes, or getting drunk and violent in bars and group picnics while their wives and girlfriends look at them with varying degrees of exasperation. One of those wives, Kathy (Jodie Comer), is our guide to the story, regaling the tale of the gang in a series of interviews with Lyon (Mike Faist). One night, she finds herself in a bar with the Vandals and catches the eye of Benny (Austin Butler), perhaps the most dedicated member of the group outside of Johnny himself. The two marry after only a few weeks, but his fealty to the group and his recklessly headstrong ways begin to drive a wedge between them. As the group changes and evolves over the years—becoming more violent and aggressive with the influx of younger riders wanting to prove themselves—a tug-of-war develops between Kathy and Johnny for Benny's love and loyalty, one which ultimately proves painful for all involved. Continue Reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →