The Rider

THE RIDER (****) I found THE RIDER to be genuine and sincere in ways that are for films these days. It is aided by some fantastic acting (Brady Jandreau's face says so much!) that feels so natural you'd swear you were watching a documentary (the family in the film is portrayed by a real family: Brady, Wayne, and Lilly Blackburn) and some gorgeous cinematography by Joshua James Richards that beautifully captures the wide open spaces of South Dakota. It's not too talky (which would have robbed a lot of the film of its power) and doesn't...

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The Nun

THE NUN (***) Make no mistake, THE NUN is not a good movie. It is quite terrible in certain moments (it has the most generic scare moments and some truly awful dialogue—there is actually an exchange that goes: “The blood of Christ” “Holy shit.” “The holiest.”), but it’s a lot of fun and really quite something to look at. My interest was piqued when friends and other critics I trust had mentioned that the film had a very Italian feel to it, specifically Michele Soavi’s THE CHURCH. There is a bit of Soavi’s THE CHURCH in that there is an evil...

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The Predator

THE PREDATOR (**1/2) Incredibly loud and wonderfully stupid in its first hour, Shane Black’s THE PREDATOR is a stripped down machine in its opening setpieces but gets derailed by Predator backstory that is just plain stupid. I did not come here for Predator mythology; I came for the predictable Shane Black snark and gory fights between a ragtag group of military outcasts and space hunters. The first half of THE PREDATOR delivers on this; the second half loses steam quickly (despite Black keeping his big action film under two hours, which was...

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First Reformed

FIRST REFORMED (***1/2) Paul Schrader wears his Bresson and Bergman influences on his sleeve with this one, and the result is a tone appropriately austere. Filmed in the Academy ratio, every shot is beautiful and compact—from the great opening tracking shot, to scenes of characters just sitting inside and talking, to the harsh, cold Northeastern exteriors that match the harsh, cold interiors of the church. Ethan Hawke’s amazing performance as Reverend Toller might just be the performance of the year (and one of the of his career). The juxtaposition...

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Hereditary

HEREDITARY (**) I don't mind arty horror. In fact, most of the Euro-horror I love so much eschews narrative for showy aesthetics; it’s one the aspects I find most appealing about that particular subgenre. I like David Cronenberg movies because they get under your skin and scare in a way that isn’t obvious. There are ways to do arty horror and still have your movie be, you know, scary. However, in the last decade or so there has been a handful of horror films whose filmmakers are hyper-focused on differentiating their it’s-not-horror-but-it’s-horror...

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John Frankenheimer: The Train

Growing up with action films in the ‘80s and ‘90s — memorizing every John Woo slow-mo gun battle, every world-weary Bruce Willis character quip, every Ah-nold one-liner, and every single frame of something like Lethal Weapon — I didn’t have to look hard to see the influence that Frankenheimer’s approach to the action film in The Train had on the films that I remember so fondly from my formative years. I love what Matt Zoller Seitz says in his remembrance of The Train, calling it: “A huge, roiling,...

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John Frankenheimer: Seven Days in May

Based on the best-selling novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II, Seven Days in May is sometimes referred to as Frankenheimer resting on his laurels by following up his previous film — the masterful The Manchurian Candidate — with yet another paranoid political thriller. That’s a bit unfair, though. Seven Days in May doesn’t have much in common with The Manchurian Candidate. It takes itself too seriously to be a satire, and it seems that Frankenheimer and his screenwriter, Rod Serling,...

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