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Horror has a very complicated and closely aligned connection to queerness. From the idea of othering the “monster” to how films stitch us into identifying with certain points of view, certain characters, horror as a genre has playing a significant role in identify formation for those who fall outside of the dominant cultural groups. The documentary The Celluloid Closet covers how Hollywood has…
I love a good monster movie and that is what The End of Oak Street is. It’s not trying to be anything more than just a fun running from dinosaurs film. That doesn’t mean it’s dumb. It rises to the occasion with smart dialogue, real feeling characters (who have decent arcs), and a plot that invests us in our heroes survival. What it doesn’t do is get distracted or weighed down by anything too…
It's been 5 years since the 2021 height of Covid (as we remember Covid) and a movie about being trapped in your house with your family, unable to go outside because something out there will kill you still feels incredibly on the nose. Attempting this is bold in that it could tap into the angst we now tie to that time or it could feel like retreading ground we don't want to revisit? I'm not sure we…
One Night Only is a very high concept rom-com, set in a world where pre-marital sex is illegal, everyone has a chip in the body which measures if they are having sex or not, and there is a Purge like night where singles can have sex for a 12 hour period. On that night our two heroes meet, bicker, and fall in love (the perpetual rom-com formula) while the clock for their window to have sex ticks…
There are certain films that just align all the right stars for my personal tastes, in all their weird configurations, and I sit there fascinated throughout. The film Peter Hujar's Day , with its idiosyncratic premise and conceit, is that sort of film, a film like few others, that works despite all the factors working against it. For those unfamiliar, in 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz had…
I haven't been a fan of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies. That's not due to the actor. I think he makes a great Spider-Man. It's that the movies have constantly had to dance around the rest of the MCU and these often leads to overstuffed films with plots that feel packaged around other ideas tied to other characters and movies. They mostly feel like they are trying to tell a Spider-Man story but…
After more than 12 years away from making a feature film, legendary New Queer Cinema Movement director Gregg Araki has come back with what turns out to be a somewhat mainstream Hollywood film that plays with our expectations about where desires meet comfortable limits. It is a fairly funny and rather accessible comedy about a boss who begins a BDSM relationship with her awkward young employee but…
If you're going to make a mess of a movie, why not make it a big mess? Rosebush Pruning , inspired by the Italian film Fists in the Pocket , is a darkly comic tragedy featuring a toxic rich family who end up killing each other (oops... spoilers) after sexualizing each other. It is often random in its plotting, rather nonsensical, and thinly drawn. But it is visually and narratively bold, taking…
Refn makes incredibly beautiful films. Imagine if he ever got his hands on a story that was worth telling. Instead we get this hollow, rather tedious story which he seems to love to tell. Her Private Hell might be one of his most painfully boring stories yet. It's complete lack of emotional investment makes it a tedious slog no matter how gorgeously he crafts his art direction, costumes,…
I’m a big fan of Virgo and his way of telling his stories visually. With Steal Away, he has crafted a hyper-stylized world for his characters which mirrors ours but feels slightly elevated to make his points. The combo of Rice and Johnson really pops off the screen and brings this almost fantastical world into focus. The strength here is how his somewhat factionalized narrative exposes the real…
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