I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a five-minute film review of Halloween Ends, which is in cinemas and on Peacock now.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: david gordon green, escapist, halloween, halloween ends, michael myers, Movie, nightmare, review, slasher, universal | Leave a comment »
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, with special guest Richard Drumm, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.
This week, Darren Aronofsky Requiem for a Dream.
Four Brooklyn residents navigate addiction and isolation in its various forms, through Summer, Fall and Winter. There is no Spring.
At time of recording, it was ranked 84th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: american dream, ass to ass, awards, controversy, Darren Aronofsky, delusion, drug addiction, drugs, ect, ellen burstyn, films, independent cinema, jared leto, jennifer connelly, just say no, marlon wayans, Movies, nightmare, obsession, Oscars, ratings, requiem for a dream, richard drumm | Leave a comment »
Last Night in Soho is a fascinating snapshot of the siren lure of nostalgia, and how it is so often filtered through a presumptive male gaze.
Last Night in Soho follows a young student named Eloise who moves to London for the first time to follow her dream of becoming a fashion designer. After some tensions with her roommate, Eloise moves out of her apartment into a small bedsit, with warnings that past tenants have had some strange experiences in the flat – disappearing in the dead of night, as if fleeing from something that shares the space. Eloise has always been sensitive to otherworldly presences, and it is no surprise when she seems to connect with the memories imprinted in her new bedroom.
Who nose?
Night after night, Eloise is seduced by memories of a young woman named Sandy, who came to London to pursue her own ambitions of becoming a singer. Sandy met a handsome talent agent named Jack, who promises that he can make all of her dreams come true. As Eloise sinks deeper into this nostalgic fantasies of the swinging sixties, she notices that the lines are begin blur – between her waking moments and her sleeping thoughts, between herself and the girl who visits her at night, between dreams and nightmares.
At its core, Last Night in Soho is a meditation on the idea that it is not always so easy to escape the past.
Bad romance.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: anya taylor-joy, edgar wright, film, giallo, last night in soho, London, male gaze, matt smith, Movie, nightmare, non-review, nostalgia, review, sixties, slasher, thomasin mckenzie, violence | 2 Comments »
Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Jay Coyle and Darren Mooney, with special guest Kurt North, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.
This time, continuing our Summer of Scorsese season, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.
Martin Scorsese is one of the defining directors in American cinema, with a host of massively successful (and cult) hits that have shaped and defined cinema across generations: Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Boxcar Bertha, Cape Fear, Casino, The Aviator, The Departed, Silence. The Summer of Scorsese season offers a trip through his filmography via the IMDb‘s 250.
Federal Marshall Teddy Daniels makes a trip across Boston Harbour to visit the psychiatric institution on Shutter Island, investigating the mysterious disappearance of one of the patients. However, as Teddy probes deeper and deeper into the workings of the facility, it becomes very clear that things are not as they appear.
At time of recording, it was ranked 156th on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the best movies of all-time.
Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: b-movie, ben kingsley, boston, conspiracy theories, dream, Inception, insanity, jason coyle, jay coyle, kurt north, Leonardo diCaprio, madness, mark ruffalo, martin scorsese, Movie, nightmare, nostalgia, reality, Shutter Island, the holocaust | Leave a comment »
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Doctor Bernice Murphy and Phil Bagnall, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.
This week and next week, we are taking a break from our Summer of Scorsese for a Halloween treat. David Fincher’s se7en.
Detective William Somerset is seven days away from retirement, and has just been partnered with a new arrival from outside the city. Detective David Mills has yet to fully adjust to the rules of the urban landscape. However, Somerset’s plans to retire are undercut after a pair of strange deaths point to something sinister simmering below the surface of the city.
At time of recording, it was ranked 20th on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the best movies of all-time.
Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: bernice murphy, brad pitt, david fincher, doctor bernice murphy, Gwyneth Paltrow, halloween, horror, kevin spacey, Morgan Freeman, nightmare, phil bagnall, scary, se7en, The 250, urban gothic | Leave a comment »
I published a new piece at The Escapist earlier today. Nightcrawler is streaming on Netflix, so it seemed like a nice opportunity to revisit the film.
Nightcrawler is very obviously a loving homage to seventies American cinema, and a commentary on the scrambling at the margins of the post-recession economy. However, writer and director Dan Gilroy frames his story in such a way as to evoke classic vampire movies. At its core, Nightcrawler is the tale of a bloodthirsty parasite prowling the streets of Los Angeles at night, but there’s more to it than that. Nightcrawler is a biting satire and a gritty drama, but it also understands the horror of the situation that it depicts.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: escapist, horror movie, jake gylllenhaal, nightcrawler, nightmare, the escapist, vampire, vampire movie | 1 Comment »
Last weekend, on the podcast I co-host called The 250, we discussed James Cagney’s 1949 gangster classic White Heat, with the wonderful Carl Sweeney from The Movie Palace Podcast. I’ve been thinking a lot about the film since, and so had some thoughts I just wanted to jot down.
White Heat is a gangster film, starring James Cagney.
It’s frequently discussed in relation to The Public Enemy, which makes sense. Both White Heat and The Public Enemy are mid-century gangster films starring James Cagney. It also merits comparison to The Roaring Twenties, another gangster film starring James Cagney and directed by Raoul Walsh. There’s a tendency to lump these sorts of films together, to examine them as part of a greater whole. It certainly makes sense in this context. After all, a huge part of the appeal of White Heat at time of release derived from seeing James Cagney playing a gangster once again.
However, there’s something altogether stranger about White Heat. It isn’t a film that fits particularly comfortably into the gangster genre, despite the obvious trappings. James Cagney plays the role of Cody Jarrett, the leader of a vicious gang introduced conducting a train robbery and who go on to plot a chemical plant raid at the climax. There is all manner of betrayal and violence, backstabbing and revenging. There are cops in dogged pursuit of the criminals, while Cody demonstrates that nobody should underestimate him.
Still, there’s something simmering beneath the surface of White Heat. As much as the film follows the structures and conventions of a crime film, it plays more like a melancholy monster movie. It is a funereal salute to a mythic figure retreating into history, a horror story about an outdated evil lurking in the shadows, trying to navigate a world that no longer has a place for it.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: atom bomb, atomic, atomic age, atomic noir, crime, Gangster, horror, insanity, james cagney, logic, mad, monster, morality, nightmare, nuclear, white heat | 4 Comments »
My name is Patrick Bateman. I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial masque which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an after shave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion. There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.
American Psycho is twenty years old, and somehow more relevant than ever.
To be fair, the film signposts this strange relevance. Towards the end of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, Bateman takes a moment to muse on Trump Tower, admiring it as it stands “tall, proudly gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight.” Throughout the film, Bateman and colleagues are obsessed with Trump. “Is that Donald Trump’s car?” asks Bateman while riding with his fiancée in a taxi. Later on, out at dinner in a low-rent restaurant, he tries to catch a colleague’s interest (and maybe his own) by asking, “Is that Ivana Trump?”
Without ever being directly present in the film or the novel, Donald Trump haunts American Psycho. Ironically, that weird relationship has only deepened in the years since the novel was published and the film was released. During his presidential campaign, Trump famously boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” It’s an argument that has become worryingly central to Trump’s campaign, with even his lawyers advancing the argument that he couldn’t be prosecuted for it as part of an argument over his tax returns.
American Psycho makes a similar argument about its protagonist. Bateman spends the entirety of the book and movie openly boasting and threatening characters with death and dismemberment, only for everybody involved to remain either willfully or accidentally ignorant of what Bateman claims to be. Bateman confesses his crimes repeatedly and openly, only for colleagues to laugh it off as a joke or shift the conversation or reveal that they weren’t really listening. American Psycho unfolds in a world where nothing is real and nothing matters. It is closer to our world than it seems.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: american psycho, christian bale, horror, mary harron, nightmare, parody, patrick bateman, satire | 2 Comments »
This film was seen as part of the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival 2020. Given the high volumes of films being shown and the number of reviews to be written, these may end up being a bit shorter than usual reviews.
Vivarium is an abrasive and aggressive work of surrealism.
It is very much of a piece with director Lorcan Finnegan’s earlier work, feeling like a clear descendant of his “ghost estate” short Foxes and his “land will swallow you whole” horror of Without Name. Indeed, Vivarium taps into many of those same fears, essentially beginning as a horror story about a young couple going house hunting and ending up lost in a monstrous and seemingly unending estate. It morphs from that into an exploration of a broader set of anxieties about the very idea of “adulthood”, of what young people expect from their adult life and what it in turn it expects from them.
Vivarium often feels like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. It features a small core cast. Although shot on an actual housing estate, Finnegan pushes the production design into the realm of the uncanny so that it looks like a gigantic creepy sound stage. The script consciously pushes its narrative into the realm of the absurd. However, throughout it all, the film remains keenly focused on a simple and strong central metaphor. Although Vivarium operates at an unsettlingly heightened level of reality, and although its populated by a mess of signifiers it never entirely explains, it remains firmly anchored in relatable ideas.
Vivarium is perhaps a little over-extended and little heavy-handed in articulating its central themes and ideas, but it is consistently interesting and ambitious. It’s well worth the time.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: abstract, dublin international film festival, film, horror, Imogen Poots, jesse eisenberg, lorcan finnegan, Movie, nightmare, non-review review, review, suburbia, surrealism, virgin media dublin international film festival, vivarium | Leave a comment »
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with guests Graham Day and Bríd Martin, The 250 is a fortnightly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.
This time, Boon Joon Ho’s Gisaengchung.
Drafted in to tutor the daughter of a rich South Korean family, the lower-class Kim Ki-woo enacts a cunning plan that will allow his entire family to infiltrate the lavish Park household. However, things quickly spiral out of control, leading to unpredictable chaos and disaster.
At time of recording, it was ranked the 34th best movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: bong joon ho, brid martin, class, class warfare, graham day, horror, mystery, nightmare, parasite, parody, South Korea, wealth | Leave a comment »
the m0vie blog 