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Dread Central •

'The Unknown' Review: Disturbing, Bewitching Body Horror [London Film Fest]

Which sounds more upsetting: you suddenly inhabit someone else’s body, or somebody else suddenly starts strutting around in yours? David Zimmerman (Niels Schneider) isn’t allowed to choose between two extra-corporeal nightmares – when the nebbish Parisian photographer is dragged to an artsy party by his friends, he locks eyes with the only other person who came wearing an overcoat, played by an especially intense Léa Seydoux. She leads him to a basement, wordlessly initiates sex, and at the poin...
AV Club •

Mark Zuckerberg stopped being compelling when Aaron Sorkin decided he was tragic

There is a pattern to how Aaron Sorkin writes his “great men.” To his credit, it’s a classic and robust approach: locate an internal contradiction to their external greatness. Mark Zuckerberg invents a social network but can’t keep any friends. Steve Jobs is a genius entrepreneur, even though everything in his life falls apart. Often they’re driven by the chip on their shoulder, like Billy Beane in Moneyball, whose resentment around his failed career pushes him towards a strictly data-driven sco...
Dread Central •

'Godzilla Minus Zero' Review: Big, Monstrous, and Confused

The first piece of score we hear in Godzilla Minus Zero – stabs of shrill, alarming strings courtesy of the tremendous Naoki Sato – accompanies a sudden dragon attack in the city of Matsumoto. On a purely sonic level, the period kaiju sequel makes it clear that our titular atomic monster is sharing the spotlight. Minus Zero takes place in 1949, two years after post-war Japan’s catastrophic but unifying encounter with Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One. Here, the surviving band of loyal pilots and sc...
The Guardian •

Will the Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman movies make a dent on tech giant evangelism?

Hollywood is sending a clear message: it’s a friend of tech. Netflix is no longer a lone disruptor: historic studio MGM is now the property of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos; David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount and subsequent Warner Bros merger was supported by his tech giant father; and Apple TV has acted as a patron for multiple film-maker passion projects. Everyone, including trendy auteur-factory A24, is tying themselves financially to AI.The enormous pull of the tech industry – including its many tr...
Men's Health •

Tom Cruise’s 10 Best Weird Performances, Ranked

MINDS FAR MORE powerful than yours and ours have tried to figure out what drives Tom Cruise. For four decades, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV has been in the big leagues of Hollywood stars, a bankable vessel of A-list charm and heroism who maintains a tight grasp on his celebrity image and whose work splits the difference between relentlessly pushing himself and classic audience satisfaction. Back when the ’80s became the ’90s, he graduated from the cocksure hits of Risky Business and Top Gun to the...
AnOther •

Na Hong-jin on Creating the Year’s Most Audacious Blockbuster Epic, Hope

They don’t show many epic monster movies at the Cannes Film Festival. Even though Na Hong-jin’s previous films (serial killer thriller The Chaser and supernatural horror The Wailing) had established the Korean director at the festival, the action extravaganza of Hope – replete with dense sci-fi lore, scatalogical humour and Oscar-nominated actors playing CGI aliens – was a jolt of adrenaline in this year’s Cannes competition. Somewhere on the Croisette, a jury including Park Chan-wook, Isaach de...
AnOther •

Remake: Ross McElwee on the Film He Never Wanted to Make

In the opening of Remake, Ross McElwee melancholically pulls back the curtain on the creative process that’s made him one of documentary cinema’s most singular talents. “Although [they] touched on broad issues like nuclear weapons proliferation or big tobacco,” says the director in his low-toned, southern-accented voiceover, “what was central in my films was always my own life, often involving my family.”
McElwee doesn’t boast the celebrity of documentarians Frederick Wiseman or Werner Herzog, b...
In Review Online •

On the Battlefield, God is Silent: A Conversation with Shinya Tsukamoto on Mr. Nelson, Did you Kill People? | In Review Online

Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto forged his legendary cult status with ultraviolent, psychosexual Japanese films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tokyo Fist, and A Snake in June. His DIY body-horror and severe stylized melodramas eschew easy genre classification, but always feature invasive, intimate brutality: Gemini is a historical tale about demons; Kotoko is a disturbing domestic drama about a mother’s mental decline; the short film Haze sees himself trapped in a vent shaft-like concrete maze.
G...
Inverse •

24 Years Later, The Most Iconic Apocalypse Thriller Of The Century Is Getting A Huge Upgrade

28 Days Later is hugely significant for many reasons: it was a key film in the 2000s zombie revival, it was a British production that competed with the best American horror films of the decade, and it was proof that future Oscar winner Cillian Murphy and screenwriter Alex Garland had long careers ahead of them. But in 2002, a digital revolution was brewing in mainstream filmmaking, and 28 Days Later’s scuzzy visual design — courtesy of Canon MiniDV camcorders and Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematogra...
AnOther •

AnOther Performance: Joe Bird

In the first of a new series spotlighting our favourite new stars, we ask actors to name the performances that inspire them most
Every rising star has their breakout role, but few involve as many broken bones as Joe Bird’s did. In the gnarly possession film Talk to Me, the Liverpool-born Australian actor played Riley, a teen who insists on playing with a haunted embalmed hand and ends up in critical care. Bird was only 14 when he simulated cracking his skull open for the film; a few years later...
Letterboxd •

Lights Up: a starter pack of 20 fantastic films with transformative movie theater scenes

The ways in which the movie theater is romanticized can be incredibly familiar to many modern cinema lovers—or anyone who can recite the Nicole Kidman AMC commercial from memory. The smell of the popcorn, the respectful silence as the lights dim, the adrenaline of 100 people reacting to the same jump scare or joke in unison; the theatrical experience appeals to us as a place—a secular, but not necessarily unspiritual, temple—we are drawn to because of a unifying desire to be swept away.
The cin...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing'

For Boeing, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 live in infamy. The first plane crashed in October 2018 in the Java Sea shortly after taking off, and the second crashed in central Ethiopia only five months later. Both were Boeing 737 Max aircrafts, a newer and more fuel efficient model that was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2017. Within two years of first entering into service, every 737 Max had been grounded after the same malfunction led to a combi...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing'

For Boeing, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 live in infamy. The first plane crashed in October 2018 in the Java Sea shortly after taking off, and the second crashed in central Ethiopia only five months later. Both were Boeing 373 Max aircrafts, a newer and more fuel efficient model that had was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2017. Within two years of first entering into service, every 737 Max had been grounded after the same malfunction led to a c...
AV Club •

The "formative years biopic" is just as bad as its broader cousin

Biopics face a serious and often unresolvable contradiction. Their audience is built upon name recognition, but the eternal cultural currency of celebrity is mitigated by a passé genre with a reputation for lazy, exploitative, and inert works. It’s no small thing to film the story of a leader, activist, or artist with a large following (and thus a large likelihood of backlash), especially if they died prematurely and tragically. Tony—the first fiction film about beloved chef memoirist and food t...
The Guardian •

Love me, love my bruised ego: what the narcissist-artist film tells us about the fear of ageing

Entertainment culture is so preoccupied with nowness that last month we were inundated with speculation about how directors under 30 topping the box office would change the industry. The flipside of a youth obsession is the conviction that age will increase irrelevance, and this is something that a new crop of films about ageing artists is zeroing in on. Specifically, Bitter Christmas, Late Fame and The Christophers are films in which artists – all male – indulge in selfishness, vanity and spite...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'Monsters of God'

As a lifelong lover of reptiles, Eric Goode has known about the world of exotic reptile smuggling for decades. “I didn't become acutely aware of the criminality of it until probably into the late ‘80s,” says the director of Tiger King and Chimp Crazy ahead of his latest documentary, another foray into wildlife crime, Monsters of God. The five-episode HBO series is Goode’s most ambitious project to date, surveying the explosion of endangered reptiles trafficked into the country in Florida from th...
Men's Health •

You Loved ‘The Odyssey.’ You’ll Love These 10 Action Epics Too.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE Odyssey is upon us, in all its prestige format rollout glory. The significance of a $250 million adaptation of Homer’s epic poem cannot be overstated: this is the first Odyssey blockbuster, and while the story of Ithaca’s king wandering across high seas and strange lands for ten years has influenced plenty of canonized works of literature and beloved media (like Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? and, if you squint, Star Trek: Voyager). But ancient historica...
AnOther •

A Guide to the Spectral Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

Beginning with his Great Patriotic War-set Ivan’s Childhood, auteur Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven features over the span of 24 years. But despite the restrictive creative conditions of the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev era – a saga of censorship that led to the filmmaker leaving his homeland for the final years of his life – all of his films feel completely uncompromised. In his dedication to foregrounding philosophy, art and poetry (Tarkovsky references his poet father, Arseny, in multiple films),...
AV Club •

"I'd been given this gift of dying": Nicolas Winding Refn on his operatic return to the big screen

Contrary to the internet’s belief, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s career did not begin with 2011’s Drive, the Los Angeles getaway driver thriller starring Ryan Gosling as an asocial aura-farming antihero. In truth, Drive marked the halfway point of Refn’s career; the Danish provocateur had already explored the dark psychological side of Copenhagen crime in his Pusher trilogy, given Tom Hardy his breakout role as England’s most violent offender in Bronson, and even tried to capitalize on the se...
Inverse •

25 Years Later, The Most Unfairly Maligned Jurassic Park Sequel Is Better Than You Remember

There have been six sequels to Jurassic Park — one trilogy, one reboot trilogy, and one reboot of the reboot — but none of them come close to the excitement and suspense of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original. Jurassic Park’s magic is deeply connected to its sense of discovery — even if you’ve seen the dinosaur romp a dozen times, the alchemy of John Williams’ score, Industrial Light and Magic’s effects, and Spielberg’s sharp direction of a stellar cast always makes it feel like we’re encountering...
AV Club •

The best Odyssey films adapt the epic in unheroic terms

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns—preferably in a four-quadrant movie format. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey is, according to the director himself, the most challenging film he’s made, filmed across six countries, often on terrain hostile to blockbuster film crews, with a massive A-lister cast and a degree of grit and realism typical to Nolan’s filmed versions of heightened material. But while The Odyssey‘s press run has supplied enough anecdotes of...
AV Club •

Bicentennial cinema shattered the myth of America

There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. How to mark the 200th anniversary of the Declaration Of Independence was debated for years, all while the country was rocked with a series of tough truths and scandals. The end of the Vietnam War, a major recession with millions unemployed, and the 1974 resignation of President Nixon—this all felt at odds with an expensive celebration of American pride and legacy. Surely a new legacy was being formed in real t...
Inverse •

In The Hand Of Dante Is A Heady, Ridiculous Art Heist Film About Gangsters And Poetry

Two authors, both alike in dignity (and both played by Oscar Isaac), stand at the center of In the Hand of Dante. The first is Dante Alighieri, the revered Italian poet who penned the Divine Comedy in the 14th century — the epic poem depicting his journey through the circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The second is Nick Tosches, a frustrated and principled New Jerseyan author at the turn of the new millennium.Don’t let the film’s fluid, handheld cinematography, ambitious dual lead perform...
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