The Wraith (1986) Review

Make no mistake – this is a bad movie. This is a film about a high school stud who gets murdered, then starts traveling between dimensions, assumes the spirit of a souped up sports car, which then starts extracting bloody and explosive revenge on the people who wronged him by driving them off the road….

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Sinister 2 – Review

There are very few horror locations able to live up to the unsettling air that surrounds the “little house on the prairie”. The claustrophobic density of trees engulfing a cabin in the woods is one thing but there’s nothing quite like the vast plains reaching out to horizon, impenetrable walls of crops for miles around…

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Hard to be a God (2004)

You’ll know within the first few minutes of the impossible to completely describe and classify film Hard To Be A God if you’re going to make it through all three hours of this carnival of cinematic madness. In production for 13 years with director Aleksei German passing away before the film could be fully completed…

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Ted 2 – Review

Ted is back in the sequel that no-one was particularly begging for, as its distinctly average figures at the US Box Office will attest. Sharing the meandering style of plot, Seth MacFarlane’s follow-up is even less consistent than its predecessor, weakly structured across nearly 2 hours of run time. To call the narrative “thin” is…

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Wetlands (2014) Review

The insane German import Wetlands is singular, gross, nauseating, highly sexual, strange, lovely, smart, insane, icky, depraved, uber-graphic, and sort of monumental. It’s never, ever going to be remade for American audiences and it’s likely to appeal strictly to fans of “cinema-as-art.” I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. You get to see a POV…

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The End of the Tour

The End of the Tour Review

The End of the Tour focuses on a long weekend in the life of deceased author David Foster Wallace, whose 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, became a literary sensation and cultural touchstone for an entire generation. Bolstered by two terrific performances by Jason Segel (as Wallace) and Jesse Eisenberg (as then Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky),…

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Bringing Out the Dead (1999) Review

Paul Schrader’s script included some shout-outs to his decades earlier work in Taxi Driver, but this was its own thing, based on Joe Connelly’s bleak novel, and looking at a particular lifetstyle we don’t see too often on screen. Nicolas Cage was electrifying here — it’s a truly bravura big-screen performance, filled with the customary…

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Boarding Gate (2007) Review

I’m always wholly fascinated by this film, and it’s something I feel that’s worth revisiting every year because of how it uses aesthetics to drive the plot. Boarding Gate is genre-hopper Olivier Assayas (Carlos, Summer Hours, Irma Vep) doing a sort-of Michael Mann-esque anti-thriller that’s more cerebral than crammed with action. It’s the kind of…

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Emperor of the North

Emperor of the North (1973) Review

I find myself frequently coming back to this title over the last few months. Emperor of the North, aka Emperor of the North Pole, is an exceedingly masculine film. You can smell the cinematic machismo dripping off of Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine all throughout this beefy action-adventure from man’s man director Robert Aldrich (The…

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