Based on a popular novel of the same name, director Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield (2025) promises fun. To riff on the immortal Dr. Steve Brule: you’ve got corn. You’ve got clowns. What more could a person want? Craig’s picture does indeed supply both cornfields and an army of killer clowns wielding everything from shovels and chainsaws to crossbows and hangman’s nooses. This combination should make for a rip-roaring good time. In fits and starts, it does. But I... Read more
Becoming a young cinephile in the aughts and early 2010s meant seeking out Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). Its writer, Harmony Korine, had gone on to disgust and inspire a generation raised on LiveLeak and the Pain Olympics. Rumored to be the uncut product of his young genius, Kids offered access to reality, an authenticity edited away even on scandal-obsessed daytime TV. Even then, it reeked of indie, of a world bygone, if only because I never would’ve been cool enough... Read more
Or maybe you should? It’s hard to say. At only 1.5k logs on Letterboxd, Tamra Davis’ Skipped Parts (2000) languishes in the great DVD Library of Alexandria, preserved but seldom and ill seen. Few movies have ever had the same effect on me. It’s a mummy, a statue of the Buddha from Edo Period Japan, an invitation to CBGBs printed on crumbled, thin paper. Skipped Parts is a relic of a society bygone. That’s why I must recommend it—for professional... Read more
When I saw the first Paranormal Activity (2007), I knew it wasn’t real. But, at the tender age of 13, I wanted it to be. Its elaborate pretension that, yes, this had all happened and that, yes, we have just been so lucky because the house’s cameras were turned on, helped. It gave me permission to suspend disbelief and to enjoy what amounted to a play on the found-footage film. Under a decade earlier, The Blair Witch Project (1999) did... Read more
I hesitate to say the “movies are back” because I think anyone paying sufficient attention knows cinema must change. There’s no going back to pre-COVID, pre-streaming. We can return to neither the New nor the Old Hollywood. No river stepped in at different times, etc. But I’m human, and I confess missing the mid-budget audience pleaser. Not everything needs to be Stan Brakhage or even Paul Thomas Anderson. Drop (2025) pretends to be nothing more than what it is: a... Read more
It feels bad to say, “it just didn’t connect with me.” Where there is technical brilliance, there is not always emotional connection. Sometimes this experience stems from emptiness, the so-called “exercise in style.” Not always, though. On occasion, I can watch a movie, appreciate its technical merits, marvel at the performances, respect its script, and still come away devoid of feeling. All the worse when this is a melodrama like Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006). As with many of Almodóvar’s films,... Read more
There’s really no way to “review” Fight Club (1999), a movie at this point so famous and so abundantly discussed that it belongs more to the pages of an Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book than to my blog. Fight Club is the harbinger of the Trumpian right. Fight Club is the toxic man’s mainstay. Fight Club is a pretty dang good movie. Fight Club is the pit in the American stomach. What more is there to say? Yesterday, for an... Read more
The idea goes that to say someone lives in “interesting times” is an insult or a term of pity. Europe in 1348-1349 would have been rather interesting—lots of puss, merriment, prayer, and death. The last days of the Aztec and Maya must have been something to behold, though not so much for those who lived through them. Imagine standing in the trenches along the Western Front. Boring in the day to day, sure, but the soldiers did live in rather... Read more
A respectful goon. The kind of henchman who pulls out your chair at dinner. A bald man, sheepish and charmingly incompetent. He’s the kid on the team who pinch hits in the bottom of the ninth of the big game because everyone else has broken all their bones sliding into various bases. He hits a single, and, even though your team loses 7-2, you hoist him up on your shoulders. Next week he’ll be back in the dugout picking his... Read more
Ever been in front of a fan on hot summer day, no AC in sight? How would you describe the experience? For my part, I’d report a mixture of gratitude and disappointment—gratitude because it’s better than nothing, disappointment because a solitary fan before a humid New Jersey summer day is like the backwash drop at the bottom of a Windex bottle squaring off against a mirror from Grey Gardens (1975). Black Bag (2025), Steven Soderbergh’s newest spy film, left me... Read more
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