4 Best Movies To Watch After The Sixth Sense (1999)

Many interpret the magic of the movies as referring to film’s ability to show audiences something they’ve never seen, immersing them in worlds they’ll never visit. But the flip side of it is also true. Sometimes, movies can magically ground viewers in worlds achingly familiar, surrounded by people so recognizable they’d swear they knew them already. That latter “trick” is what A Real Pain pulls off with unfussy ease. David (Jesse Eisenberg, also pulling writing and directing duties) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) were the kind of cousins who grew up so close that you could confuse them for brothers. Time and responsibility take their toll, though. A family man, David can no longer spend all night running around the City, even as he now calls it home. Benji, on the other hand, has plenty of time but has rooted himself in Binghamton and the basement of his mom’s house. Before the start of the film, their grandmother dies, prompting the duo to finally follow through on the tour of Poland—and visit her childhood home—they had been circling for years. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin struggle to see each other clearly. (Searchlight Pictures) The big headline of early coverage of A Real Pain has been Culkin and rightfully so. Benji is a maddening figure. He speaks empathetically and seems poised to big up everyone around him one moment, the next lashing out, unable to see a situation from anyone’s perspective but his own. His criticisms are often nasty and barbed. Yet he’s quick to dismiss them when the occasional target circles back to say, “That hurt, but you did show me something true.” He’s well-loved but pushes that love to its limits, seemingly just to point and say, “See, you don’t care about me.” It’s a perfectly cooked steak of a role and Culkin relishes it without swimming in the ham river (to mix meat metaphors). 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 →

When Godfrey Reggio’s monumental experimental documentary Koyannistqatsi (Life Out of Balance in Hopi) first entered the zeitgeist, its radical nature as a postmodern film, with a thoroughly entrancing score by Phillip Glass, became intertwined with the rise of MTV and a new era of visual aesthetic being born within the music sphere. From the noise rock band Cows to electronic musicians Dr. Atmo and Oliver Leib to superstar pop singer Madonna, the film had an indelible effect on music and the music video.  Continue Reading →

I am sitting in the waiting room at an Urgent Care in Maine, waiting to see someone about a mild allergic reaction to a bee sting. It is August 2003, and I am thirteen years old. While my mother and I wait, I look up at the muted television, and suddenly I can't breathe. The news broadcast is carrying a live feed of what I recognize as the Brooklyn Bridge, and to my horror, thousands of people are streaming across it, trying to get out of New York City. My first thought, before I stammer to my mother that she needs to ask for the remote, that she needs to turn up the volume, that she needs to call our family and see if they're safe, is: It's happening again. We manage to unmute the waiting room television and watch, frightened, as the news breaks of the massive blackout that has paralyzed the Northeast. No one knows the cause, and I convince myself: It is happening again. Continue Reading →