"What sets Eli Roth apart from other contemporary American horror directors is his unique braiding of current issues with high genre literacy. This holds true for his latest effort, Thanksgiving, an anti-consumerist holiday giallo that traffics openly in reflexivity."
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Killers of the Flower Moon 2023
America's ultimate cineaste-auteur honors the Western's panoramic grandeur while also reckoning with the colonialist violence endemic to its legacy. Like all of Scorsese's best work, it trades easy moralizing for contention with systemic evil's murky confusion at the level of individual subjectivities.
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Friday the 13th 1980
Dismissing Friday the 13th (1980) as a “Halloween knockoff" has become such a commonly parroted criticism that it’s basically devoid of meaning. Horror has always been in conversation with itself, preoccupied with meta-narratives, recycled traditions, recitations, and repetitions. This dates to the genre’s literary inception—consider the classic Gothic novels The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Monk (1796), which all engage with found documents, second-hand stories, and intertextuality. Further, Halloween (1978) is—by co-writer-director-composer John Carpenter's…
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Mystic River 2003
Tragedy of contingencies. Eastwood's definitive statement on violence, vengeance, and family. Possibly his greatest film.
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Satan Wants You 2023
"Satan Wants You wisely elides ridiculing the era it depicts, instead level-headedly examining the factors that gave birth to Smith and Pazder’s book and its ensuing cultural hysteria."
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Sympathy for the Devil 2023
"Sympathy for the Devil works best when viewed purely as a vehicle (no pun intended) for Cage."
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Scarface 1983
Brian De Palma's take on Macbeth gives bullet-riddled Pacino his Throne of Blood moment, invoking Toshiro Mifune with an abdomen full of arrows, eyes crazed as he witnesses the fallout of his monomaniacal ambition. One of the definitive American texts on capitalism as false dream turned nightmare.
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Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning 2012
The ultimate objet d'art of postmodern pop culture, a landscape overpopulated by remakes, reboots, requels, remixes, reimaginings, returns. Under the auspices of a DTV franchise sequel, John Hyams offers a diegesis on the collective unconscious of 21st century Eurowesternism via visual media collage: this film invokes everything from Grand Theft Auto to New French Extremity to Luis Buñuel to David Lynch's doppelganger nightmares. As an artist, Hyams traffics in the domain of physical violence and the human body, but this…
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