Primal Fear

Oct 14, 2018 — If horror is going to be forever plagued by remakes and sequels, we could do worse than this year’s Halloween and Suspiria.

Apr 20, 2018 — “Jiri Trnka didn’t craft his puppet-cartoon shorts and features merely to imitate life,” writes Michael Sragow for Film Comment. “His endlessly original and inventive movies incorporate life, or transcend it. Trnka insisted that he was ‘local,’ and drew many of...

Dec 12, 2017 — Alexander Payne skewers the absurdities of American politics in this tale of a high-school presidential campaign gone ugly.

Sep 11, 2017 — “On paper, what could be more sordid than an interview-portrait with Issei Sagawa, the infamous cannibal who became a tabloid sensation in the early 80s after he murdered and ate part of a Dutch woman in Paris?” asks Dan Sullivan...

Sep 5, 2017 — “Apparently the word refers to an actual traumatic state caused by getting lost in a forest,” begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. “However, if the title Woodshock leads you to expect a horror movie about the results of bad acid at...

Jul 23, 2017 — “Exploding across the stressed out summer of 2017 like a powder keg thrown into a room that’s already on fire, Kathryn Bigelow’s hectic but harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots is inevitably as concerned with the persistence of...

May 21, 2017 — Tonight, Sunday, May 21, 2017, Twin Peaks returns, just as Laura Palmer (may have) predicted it would twenty-five years ago, give or take. Eighteen one-hour episodes, all directed by David Lynch and cowritten with the show’s original co-creator, Mark Frost....

Sep 27, 2016 — This monumental meditation on the Ten Commandments captures the spiritual undercurrents of life in late-Communist Poland.

Feb 18, 2016 — The Kid marked Charlie Chaplin’s wholehearted embrace of sentiment, which he intertwined with the slapstick he was known for to enrich his Tramp character and carry the narrative of feature-length directorial debut.

Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.