Tag: comedy
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A Real Pain (2025)
I just saw A Real Pain and it was good. It’s a Holocaust dramedy about New York cousins played by Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg (also the writer/director) who go on a Jewish heritage tour in Poland to honour their late grandmother. It’s a funny, moving, and refreshingly compact film, reminiscent of Woody Allen for…
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Heart Eyes (2025)
Pretty clever mix of slasher and rom-com tropes that, while not a game changer to any degree, is novel enough to help keep the slasher genre going another decade. Slasher films in recent years have been moving more towards comedy than ever before. Post-Scream (1996), these movies were almost always ironic or self-aware to some…
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Companion (2025)
I just saw Companion and it was really good, a clever and comic satirical take on the classic feminist horror The Stepford Wives, the one where post-sexual revolution men replace their strong and intelligent wives with automatons who wax floors in pinnies all day. It’s tough to synopsise Companion, which comes on the heels of Barbarian (2022). (It shares with that…
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The Coffee Table (2022)
A husband, Jesus (pronounced Hey-Zeus, played by David Pareja), and wife, Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), with their newborn baby, are looking to buy a coffee table. The table is composed of two nude women in faux-gold trim supporting a glass top. Clearly, it belongs in a bachelor pad as opposed to a young couple’s…
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Halloween Pick ‘n’ Mix: Shocker (1989) and The Blood Beast Terror (1968)
Surprisingly cheesy and dull Wes Craven thriller, Shocker is nowhere near as good as The People Under the Stairs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and his other classics. It’s about a young man pursued by a serial killer, Horace Pinker, who kills most of his adopted family, his girlfriend, and sundry other people in…
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The Substance (2024)
“Pretty girls should ALWAYS smile!” So says Harvey (last name not revealed, but you can guess what it might be), a sleazy producer played by Dennis Quaid in The Substance, which I just saw yet am willing to crawl out on a limb to say is the best new horror film I’ve seen in the…
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
I just saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and really enjoyed it. The plot is a little busy and overcomplicated, but it’s delivered at such a level of whimsy and love of tongue-in-cheek macabre storytelling that it works, from a scene of a dismembered succubus nail-gunning herself together while “Tragedy” plays, to a literal soul train and a…
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Kinds of Kindness (2024)
I just saw Kinds of Kindness and it was certainly an experience. A trilogy of short stories themed around sex, relationships, abuse, and power, it may be director/co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ coldest and most contemptuous film, with a title as playfully un-apt on a surface level as Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), another film about sad and…
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Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
I just watched Lisa Frankenstein and it was one of those movies where almost nothing really works, and yet… I kind of loved it. The unfortunately named Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) is an ‘80s teenage outcast whose mother was killed by an axe murderer. She’s now struggling to deal with a bitchy stepmother (Carla Gugino)…
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American Fiction (2023)
I recently saw American Fiction and it was good. The directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, it stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a literature PhD and novelist whose upper-middle-class Black experience is a hard sell for publishers looking to flog books. With his widowed mother’s medical bills to pay, however, he decides to turn…
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