Though it died a pretty swift death at the box office in the fall of 1990, Adrian Lyne’s hallucinatory horror freakout Jacob’s Ladder has gone on to a better place, climbing to an afterlife of cult fandom. Written by Joel Bruce Rubin, whose script sat on the Hollywood blacklist for a solid decade, the film fancied…
The hook of Good Boys, Hollywood’s latest odyssey of comic adolescent mischief, is that the kids behaving badly are, for once, truly kids. The usual R-rated parade of randy mishaps, drug-related foibles, and foul-mouthed banter has formed around characters just out of elementary school. That may sound like a minefield…
A plump, severed toe floats to the surface of a meat stew, ready to be unwittingly gobbled. A decapitated head rolls down a chimney, then springs to maniacal, vaudevillian life, shouting and singing. A spider bite on a cheek keeps growing and growing and growing, until… well, arachnophobes beware. Like scouts huddled…
There’s a scene early in Luce, a riveting new psychodrama about race and preconceptions, that’s as tense as any thriller, and all it really comes down to is two people talking in a classroom, their deceptively polite conversation shading into passive-aggressive antagonism. One of the two is the title character, a…
Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a Western revenge yarn of such heightened cruelty and suffering that it basically demands to be read as allegory. Westerns, as a rule, are violent, and that perhaps goes double for the Aussie ones, which tend to be more pitiless than their American cousins, stripping the genre of its…
The vision of 1950s America presented by The Mountain, Rick Alverson’s strikingly glum midcentury drama, bears little resemblance to the one that’s come to dominate the pop-culture imagination. There are no white-picket fences, no ostentatious displays of economic prosperity, no hallmarks of Space Age newness—none of…
It’s Saturday afternoon at Logan Arcade, and all eyes are on a blue cartoon bee in a stripped sweater, slowly riding a snail past a goal line. This isn’t an unusual spectacle at the Chicago arcade bar, whose large selection of classic coin-ops, pinball machines, and licensed light-gun blockbusters all seem to lead to…
Making a season of Rick And Morty takes time. Like, a lot of it. It takes so much time, in fact, that the show has even explicitly poked fun at the long stretches between seasons, letting a certain little poopy pants cop to the “like, year-and-a-half… or longer” viewers would have to wait to see a finale-ending…
Fifty years after Steven Spielberg made a whole nation afraid to go in the water, sharks still prowl the summer movie season. This is, in fact, the fourth consecutive year that a descendent of Jaws will descend upon multiplexes during the warmest season—next month brings the gnashing teeth and ominous fins of a 47…
The Lion King, Disney’s latest attempt to make a new hit from the blueprint of one of its old ones, begins the exact same way as the 1994 animated smash on which it’s based: with a blood-red sun peaking over the horizon of the African Serengeti, a single chanting voice rising with it. What follows is a shot-for-shot…
How do you screw up a set piece as foolproof as Dave Bautista versus Iko Uwais? Uwais, the astonishingly limber Indonesian martial artist who starred in The Raid, has been wasted in American movies before—given nothing cool to do on the Millennium Falcon, asked to play second fiddle to Mark freakin’ Wahlberg. But he’s…
