scumbelievable posts
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In the Flesh: The First Omen
A few lines of dialogue that ring a little tin-eared. A final sequence which, while not bad, exists solely to tie things into a franchise. Aside from these minor and fleeting imperfections, Arkasha Stevenson’s directorial debut is a veritable great white shark of a movie, a ton and change of teeth...
In the Flesh: The Taste of Things
Oysters nestled in soft pats of butter, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and topped with little pyramids of glistening black caviar. Ice cream spread with a wooden spoon between rounds of moist, light sponge, then encrusted in a cocoon of French meringue, drizzled in liquor, and limned with barely visible...
In the Flesh: Baby Reindeer
It’s been a long time since something rattled me so badly I had to step back and shake it off, my skin crawling, nausea roiling my stomach. Baby Reindeer rattled me that badly. I set it aside for a day before returning to it, and when I did, it slugged me again just as hard. There’s something ab...
In the Flesh: I Saw the TV Glow
“I’m sorry,” wheezes Owen (Justice Smith), limping through the dingy innards of the Chuck E. Cheese-like purgatory where he’s worked for twenty years. “I’m sorry about earlier. This new medication I’m on.” The business’s patrons ignore him, lost in their cheap diversions, not carin...
In the Flesh: Challengers
Guadagnino’s always been an odd duck for me, recognizably freaky in his preoccupations, but too tame and visually restrained to get me fully onboard with his execution. Challengers is easily my favorite thing he’s done to date, but it suffers from the same lifeless visuals and mediocre, directio...
June 2024 Schedule: DYKE NIGHT
6/2, 1pm & 7pm: LOVE LIES BLEEDING6/5, 7pm: WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE6/9, 1pm & 7pm: BOUND6/12, 7pm: THE HANDMAIDEN6/16, 1pm & 7pm: NEON DEMON6/19, 7pm: TAR6/23, 1pm & 7pm: SINGLE WHITE FEMALE6/26, 7pm: THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
In the Flesh: Immaculate
The Catholic Church’s obsessive quest to maintain control over the bodies of women, through means both psychological and legal, has resulted in over a century of devastating misogynist violence, the legacy of which runs like a trail of bloody afterbirth from the mass graves under its Magdalene Lau...
In the Flesh: Monkey Man
Stylish, visually accomplished, and gratifyingly preoccupied with impact and momentum, Monkey Man is an impressive little action flick with a bracing spine of anti-Hinduvta politics. It shows definite signs of debut feature weakness — overreliance on rapid cuts, needle drops too broad and obvious,...
In the Flesh: Infested
Fear of spiders is so commonplace that virtually everyone knows the clinical term for it, but making audiences feel the unreasoning, hysterical intensity of that fear is a completely different order of business. Sébastien Vaniček’s Infested captures that feeling exactly, earning the descriptor ...
In the Flesh: Shōgun
Shōgunis something special, the kind of adaptational success you hope against hope to see at least once in a blue moon. A difficult and problematic piece of source material reworked by talented artists and technicians into something smart enough to see and exploit its own fault lines in order to en...
In the Flesh: History of the Occult
“The future is over,” says Federicci (Agustín Recondo), pronouncing each syllable like he’s tonguing the empty socket of a pulled tooth. He can’t remember where he heard the phrase, or what it means, or how it might pertain to the black magic-inflected mystery at the heart of this disturbin...
In the Flesh: Late Night with the Devil
David Dastamalchian does a lot of things very well. Conjuring up a believable turn as a late-night talk show host, it turns out, isn’t one of them. Late-night host Jack Delroy’s as flat as a pancake and as deep as a puddle, a cardboard cutout with “protagonist” scribbled across it, and there...
May 2024 Schedule: BLACK BAG
5/1, 7pm: BURN AFTER READING5/5, 1 & 7pm: CASINO ROYALE5/8, 7pm: IMPERIUM5/12, 1 & 7pm: DEEP COVER5/15, 7pm: JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH5/19, 1 & 7pm: TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY5/22, 7pm: THE LIVES OF OTHERS5/26, 1 & 7pm: LUST, CAUTIONTrailer by Vincent Ash Renee
In the Flesh: Beyond Outrage
What if you stripped all the emotion out of, say, The Godfather 2? What if you cut all the scenes of home life, all the malaprops and blunders and arguments from The Sopranos? In a lot of ways it feels like Beyond Outrage is the Yakuza movie Takeshi Kitano has been working toward making for the last...
In the Flesh: Road House (2024)
I like watching men beat the ever-loving shit out of each other. I like oddball pugilists and seedy Florida scenery. I like Jake Gyllenhaal! Doug Liman’s Road House, a remake of the belovedly gonzo and meat-headed 1989 Patrick Swayze classic, is a likable movie, big and muscular and just the right...
In the Flesh: Stopmotion
My defining flaw in all my relationships has always been my propensity for disappearing into my work. Finding a little success as a writer has only made it worse. I suppose I feel I have a better excuse now, that by burying my head in reviews and novels and comic scripts I’m providing for my loved...
In the Flesh: Love Lies Bleeding
Are there weaknesses in Rose Glass’s sophomore picture? Yes. Does its reach exceed the grasp of its special effects from time to time? Sure. It’s not a perfect movie, not the kind of thing you could call a masterpiece. Shot composition is often a little hinky, and it could really stand an inject...
April 2024 Schedule: BEATDOWN
4/3, 7pm: BREAKDOWN4/7, 1pm & 7pm: BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 994/10, 7pm: DRUNKEN MASTER4/14, 1pm & 7pm: CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON4/17, 7pm: TRUE LIES4/21, 1pm & 7pm: FIRST BLOOD4/24, 7pm: KUNG FU HUSTLE4/28, 1pm & 7pm: HARDCORE HENRY
In the Flesh: The Aviator
Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) pushes the field of aviation forward through brute stubbornness and creativity unfettered by knowledge or economic restraint. He pushes and pulls and demands and demands again, throwing himself against reality, and because the industry is both hidebound and still ve...
Preview: Cuckoo Prologue
Prologue: The Good NewsAngel’s Climb, Montana1991Monica Howard couldn’t stop cleaning. It was two days until her daughter Casey — seventeen in three weeks — came home from camp, a thought that nagged at the back of her mind every moment she wasn’t scrubbing, sweeping, tidying, mopping, or ...
In the Flesh: Dune Part 2
Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) hangs on the reins of a massive sandworm as it streaks through the desert, dunes collapsing in its wake like tidal waves in colorless slow-motion. Feyd Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) duels an Atreides retainer in sun-bleached photo negative while...
In the Flesh: Sexy Beast Season One
I’m so incredibly pleased to have been proven wrong so many times in the past year. I try to go into every movie and TV show ready to be surprised and delighted, open to the possibility of joy, but living up to Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast is an order tall enough that I felt pretty bearish on th...
In the Flesh: Poor Things
I think if this morning you’d asked me to sit down and watch a steampunk adaptation of Frankenstein where the monster was a hot girl and it ended with a happy polycule, I’d have told you where you could stick it. Having now seen Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, I can confidently say I’d have b...
In the Flesh: The Zone of Interest
Every frame of the first half of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest looks like a painting made by an alternate universe Norman Rockwell who served enthusiastically in the Hitler Youth. The lederhosen, the rosy-cheeked children, the careful color grading to emphasize the Höss family’s extrem...
March 2024 Schedule: Vibe Check
3/3, 1pm & 7pm: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA3/6, 7pm: TITUS3/10, 1pm & 7pm: SPEED RACER3/13, 7pm: THE FALL3/17, 1pm & 7pm: BRAZIL 3/20, 7pm: THE ISLAND OF LOST CHILDREN3/24, 1pm & 7pm: DUNE3/27, 7pm: LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
In the Flesh: Life
That Daniel Espinosa’s Life is aping Alien hardly qualifies as an insight. Quarantine breaches, a terrifyingly efficient lifeform tearing through the crew of a claustrophobic spaceship, human dramas and institutional betrayals taking place in an environment a knife’s edge away from the obliterat...
In the Flesh: Ready Player One
I recently met my boyfriend’s four-year-old twins, which was very sweet and special. During the interminable runtime of Ready Player One I found myself continually drawn back to the memory of these adorable children excitedly showing me each and every one of their toys and favorite objects, the th...
In the Flesh: Kids
It took me about half an hour to realize that what Kids reminded me of with its relentless walls of dialogue and incessant, irresistible encroachment of misery into the lives of its characters was The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. It’s as naturalistic as Cook is affected, to be sure, b...
In the Flesh: American Fiction
American Fiction succeeds in two ways: first, and rather indifferently, as literary fiction populated by the kind of well-rounded and complex, contradictory characters with which Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) fills his unpopular but critically praised novels, and second (and much mor...
In the Flesh: Brawl in Cell Block 99
Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughan) is a piece of shit. In the first few minutes we know the man we watch as he surveils and terrorizes his wife, Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter), bloodying his hands in the act of tearing her car apart after she reveals she’s been seeing another man. Throughout Brawl in Cel...
