I Guess I'll Write About Movies Now

When I was a young kid, my mom told me about a sprawling piece of pop art that captured her generation's imagination, and inspired countless hours of discussion and dissection in dorm rooms and coffee houses throughout the nation as the country's youths attempted to parse the layers of meaning and history hinted at in its rich, allegorical text. It was "American Pie." The song and not the movie, in case that wasn't clear. Whatever you may think about "American Pie," it succeeds in creating the ruins of a world all its own, and leaves enough bricks laying about for interested listeners to move about and rearrange and just generally play with. In creating  Kinds of Kindness,  writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, with co-writer Efthimis Filippou, is similarly successful in creating his own precious world (or worlds, rather) for viewers to delve into and devour in search of a deeper meaning that may or may not be there. Kinds of Kindness  is gorgeous, and cring...

One of my earliest movie memories was of watching Poltergeist  while one of my mom's friends was babysitting me. I think I was in Kindergarten. Another time was watching Aliens  on HBO after my parents had vetted it to make sure it wasn't too  scary. I must have been in first or second grade. The point is, the 1980s were different. We were pretty okay with kids seeing gore, horror, and over-the-top violence, so long as the good guys won and the bad guys got punished. Those kinds of movies were okay, assuming there wasn't a bunch of nudity. Now, without giving away too much, let me say that  MaXXXine is exactly the kind of movie my parents would not have let me watch when I was a kid. It is lurid, loud, and unrepentant. There are exposed breasts, people snort cocaine (and for some reason aren't immediately punished by the universe), testicles get stomped on. You get the idea. It is also a fantastic horror film, and a beautiful pinnacle to writer/director Ti West's ...

I get the impulse to burn the system down, to gut society down to the studs and rebuild it. The idea that you can just hit a reset button and start over is appealing. And not just because this is a presidential election year. Part of the appeal of end-of-the-world movies like Michael Sarnoski's  A Queit Place: Day One is imagining what you would do and how you would fare if it all fell apart. It's like that feeling of excited anxiety you feel right before ending a relationship that's run its course, or when faced with a blank canvas. That senseless freedom is the sort of feeling that makes Libertarianism so appealing to teenagers and the 20-something guys who love unregulated crypto and legal weed but hate paying taxes. But the end of the world gets messier once you think about stuff like cancer, and the treatment thereof. Or electricity. Or food. Or children. Or not being ripped to shreds by angry space dogs that look like someone redesigned the Demogorgon from Stranger T...

There are many quotable moments in The Way of the Gun , most not fit for polite company. The one that I think about most is from elderly gangster Joe Sarno, played by James Caan: “The only thing you can guess about a broken down old man is that he is a survivor .” That word is loaded. “Survivor.” What does it mean to survive? Survival conjured up ideas of overcoming adversity, escaping death, maybe getting knocked around by the world, but continuing to breathe. Thelma is story of survivors. Survivors like June Squibb’s 93 year-old Thelma, who is like a kettlebell sewed up inside a teddy bear. She presents a soft and gentle surface that, when pressed, gives way to guts of absolute iron. Then there's Richard Roundtree’s Ben, a similarly rock-ribbed old timer, with an additional layer of “I’m too old for this shit” painted on top. Together, they’re a delightful duo, perfectly mismatched for an onscreen adventure. Writer/director Josh Margolin takes the pair on a city-spanning quest...

Confession time: I went to Catholic high school. I took four years of theology classes and sat through I don’t even know how many masses in the school auditorium, and it was fine. There was nothing overly traumatizing about it, which seems odd, considering just how much Catholicism has contributed to horror in our mass media. There’s so much of it, in fact, that some of my friends wrote a book about Catholic horror on television . Why does the Catholic Church offer such a rich vein for horror? Well, it could be that the vein is full of blood. From Jesus’ crucifixion to communion, from lions to the martyrs, the Catholic Church is bursting with blood. It also includes a cloistered side, with plenty of dark corners, perfect for hiding monsters of all sorts. One of the most enduring types of horror to come out of those dark corners, other than sexual abuse, is demonic possession. It is a time-honored and profitable genre, filled with classics and embarrassments, and everything between. The...