6 Best Movies To Watch After Men (2022)

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →

Ambulance Michael Bay, whose 1990s actioners are—for good and ill—iconic parts of the decade’s cinema, and whose 2000s and 2010s work is reliably fascinating (from the terrific Pain & Gain to the baleful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) delivers a bombastic chase movie that doubles as a damn good character study. Loving but criminal brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) take an ambulance hostage to escape a heist gone sideways. Along for the ride are a masterful EMT (Eiza González) resigned to personal apathy, and a critically injured cop (Jackson White). Amidst the carefully shaped chaos of burnt rubber and bullets, Bay makes space for Gyllenhaal (frenzied and in denial about how badly everything’s gone) Abdul-Mateen II (trying to keep cool even as that becomes impossible) and González (who must break out of her self-built walls if she is to survive) to bounce off each other in a pile of compelling ways. [JH] Continue Reading →

Remember when conspiracy theories used to be fun? Well, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word, but entertaining? Once, they were limited to harmless weirdos who would gladly give a presentation on chemtrails or how many different assassins were actually at Dealey Plaza when JFK passed by, but could also at least maintain some veneer of normalcy. Then the internet made it easier for people to spend most (instead of just some) of their time discussing their favorite conspiracies, without anyone telling them that they were getting obsessed, or that what they were saying sounded insane. And then, of course, QAnon turned conspiracy theories into a kind of religion, one in which its followers were willing to kill to prove their belief. It stopped being entertaining a long time ago, and now, like a lot of things about the world in its current state, it’s just bleak and terrifying. Continue Reading →

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 →

Another week, another showcase of the latest and greatest from Montreal's Fantasia International Film Fest -- including some real barn-burners this time around from Canada and Japan, respectively. First up is a heaping helping of Southern Gothic menace with Vincent Grashaw's What Josiah Saw, a film that throws its viewers into a kettle of water and slowly turns up the temperature one degree at a time until you don't even realize you're boiling. Set among four diffuse chapters whose connections only truly unravel in the final act, What Josiah Saw tracks the estranged, diasporic Graham family, three children haunted by the suicide of their matriarch decades prior. It was an act presumably precipitated by the various and sundry sins of their despotic, controlling father Josiah (a menacing, magnetic Robert Patrick), a man who's long touted his disbelief in God and who often took his earthly rages out on his family. The kids' childhood traumas bleed through into adulthood: Eli (Nick Stahl) is an unscrupulous criminal fresh out of jail, in debt to an unscrupulous bar owner played by Jake Weber; Mary (Kelli Garner) has ostensibly escaped to normalcy, but her anxieties about potential motherhood create rifts between her and her husband (Tony Hale). Then there's Thomas (Scott Haze), the comparatively simple-minded brother who stayed, the only one still in thrall to Josiah's whims. He seems happy to be there, quietly accepting of his fate as Josiah's lapdog. This becomes especially clear when Josiah announces one morning that his mother came to him in a vision the night before: She's burning in Hell for killing herself, and Josiah knows the only way to save her. The two fix up the house and prepare for guests -- just as Eli and Kelli get word that an oil company is ready to sell their childhood home, the source of all their grief and pain, for loads of money. Continue Reading →

When it comes to suffering, no one does it like Catholics. Consider Opus Dei, the secretive branch of Catholicism that still allegedly practices self-flagellation, or the hardcore worshipers who recreate Christ’s crucifixion every Easter, rather than dyeing eggs or baking a ham. Even when mortification of the flesh isn’t involved, no other religion promotes the idea of misery as the pathway to salvation. Rose Glass’s nightmarish Saint Maud digs deep into the pathology of that mindset, and is something you won’t likely forget for a long time. Continue Reading →