Imagine if Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Darren Aronofsky and Gaspar Noe collaborated on a film. If they did, it might look something like Coralie Fargeat’s extraordinary The Substance, a film that blends multiple elements both familiar and innovative into something truly unique and utterly unforgettable. To unpack the (inevitably) reductive comparison, The Substance features spaces…
Midway through The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, in the midst of a breakdown (breakthrough?), surrounded by his typewriter and empty bottles and strewn about pages, signifiers of talent devolving into madness, the successful yet troubled novelist at its center self-consciously admits to having recently written only “first lines and first pages. No middle. No end.”…
One of the most attractive and thrilling aspects of Tsugumi Ohba’s manga and Tetsuro Araki’s anime adaptation of Death Note, is that the persistent and ever-twisting mind games played against a stylish and neo-noir backdrop always seem to build on the one preceding it until it reaches unfathomable heights. Though there have been live-action adaptations…
Writer/director Shane Black certainly knows how to make a good buddy-cop movie. He chalked a first Hollywood kill with 1987’s “Lethal Weapon,” the tale of two trigger-happy LAPD detectives, now considered a cornerstone of the cannon. His partner on that project was producer (now super-producer) Joel Silver, with the pair continuing to collaborate in the…
