Hal Shelburn has a monkey on his back. Not an actual monkey, mind you, but one of those grinning, wind-up, midcentury percussion-playing simians that, outside of the jaundiced world of supernatural fiction, may only be the culprit for violating a noise ordinance or two. But in writer-director Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, death follows every thwack of the snare. Hal, played by … [Read more...]
‘Bad Shabbos’ examines, hilariously, the art of coming together
If you believed the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This would have benefited from a healthy dose of mistaken identities, physical humor and other hallmarks of vintage slapstick, then Bad Shabbos is the film for you. Wait long enough, and one character is literally hit in the face with a pie. But this is no flippant dismissal of Daniel Robbins’ irreverent new comedy centered … [Read more...]
‘Nickel Boys’: Keeping the faith while in a Florida hellscape
In director RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s celebrated 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, we’re denied the whole picture in more ways than one. First, there’s the literal sense of visual deprivation: Ross shot the movie in the square 1:37:1 aspect ratio, meaning it leaves voids of black space on both sides of the movie screen. Secondly, for a film that is inspired by the … [Read more...]
‘Wolf Man’: Staying human, as the fur flies
Lycanthropy is not for the faint of heart. Bloody lacerations appear, seemingly out of nowhere, on arms and legs. Teeth tumble from mouths like dew from plants. Toenails detach themselves from their appendages, the useless flotsam of a metamorphosis in progress. Bones wriggle and readjust with the curdling cracks of a nightmare visit to the chiropractor. It’s been a good 20 … [Read more...]
The View From Home: WWII spycraft, stealth feminism in Kino’s latest film noir box set
Kino Lorber recently retrieved three titles from the distributor’s seemingly bottomless well of obscure noirs from the genre’s golden age for yet another impactful box set. The Dark Side of Cinema XXI ($33.22 Blu-ray) features three titles that largely dance around the traditional expectations of noir, mixing its shadowy atmosphere with timely espionage drama and hothouse … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Solondz’s disturbing ‘Happiness,’ and a wry wolfman movie
As director Todd Solondz himself concedes in a bonus interview for Criterion’s long-awaited release of 1998’s Happiness ($34.99 4K, $27.99 Blu-ray, $13.91 DVD), the film “never would have been financed today.” This perspective seems to be the consensus, owing to shifting social mores, to increased institutional adversity to risk, and I suppose to wokeism. Down to brass tacks, a … [Read more...]
‘Speak No Evil’ opts for thriller clichés after psychological study
For city couples like Ben and Louise Dalton, played by Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis in Speak No Evil, the invitation to spend a holiday in the English countryside sounds like just the respite they need to recharge their dimming batteries. Sure, they only met the hosts once, as fellow tourists on an Italian sojourn, but they seemed harmless enough — maybe even exciting in … [Read more...]
‘Red Rooms’ a disturbing look at serial killer obsession in the AI age
Chromatically, Pascal Plante’s colorfully titled thriller Red Rooms (opening Friday in Lake Worth Beach) lives in a world of black and white. The movie is set largely in two locations. One is an antiseptic, glaringly bright courtroom in Montreal, where a man named Ludovic Chevalier is standing trial for murdering, maiming and sexually violating (the heinous order of events is … [Read more...]
Powerful ‘Green Border’ a brutal look at refugees trapped in Europe’s freedom mirage
A single apple to feed a family, passed among its members like contraband. The existential utility of a partially charged cellphone. A $200 bottle of water. The things they carry, and the things they leave behind—whether a suitcase of valuables or the elders too weak, too injured or too exhausted to continue the journey. These are the considerations of the Middle Eastern and … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Six in Paris’ an effective New Wave omnibus and travelogue
Like the more cumbersome New York Stories 24 years later, 1965’s Six in Paris, now on Blu-ray (Icarus Films, $25.52), is an anthology film whose central theme is its setting. Rightly believing that Paris is an “inexhaustible” subject for cinema, as he tells an interviewer in one of the Blu-ray’s extras, producer Barbet Schroeder enlisted six directors, mostly associated with … [Read more...]