The Dark Backward: A Freakish Touch

Last updated on: June 9, 2025 at 4:52 pm By Chase Padusniak

With thanks to J.G. Michel, host of the Parallax Views podcast, I have been taking in the films of Adam Rifkin. Rifkin strikes me as the rare journeyman-auteur hybrid. His filmography looks like a Jackson Pollack, covering everything from Charlie Sheen-narrated sororial dramas to sex-laden slashers and comedies starring wrestlers. Almost all “trash” by typical, middlebrow standards but always rich in canted angles and pitch perfect cuts. He does it all, it seems, for studios. Maybe for the money. But... Read more

Final Destination Bloodlines: Uhh, It’s Fun

Last updated on: June 1, 2025 at 4:13 pm By Chase Padusniak

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If Final Destination Bloodlines (2025) can bear an explication de texte, I am not the man for it. At least not right now, not at this point in my life. I have no doubt that an interested party could speak to its brilliant uses of CGI and its subversion of tropes implied by its formal and generic shapes. In the distance, I think I even see the explication breaking through, its shell giving way to reveal more socially attuned analysis.... Read more

Sinners: Whose Sins? Which Evil?

Last updated on: May 26, 2025 at 5:44 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Late to the game as usual, I caught Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) yesterday. It’s already had a monthlong run in theaters. While internet cinephiles have tussled over the film’s effectiveness, audiences are enamored. Sinners has pulled in over three times its budget and seems poised to be among the most successful genre experiments of the last decade. Coogler may be a superhero director, but here he helps the limping film industry find its way out of a failing formula. And... Read more

Clown in a Cornfield: Not Enough Clowning Around

Last updated on: May 17, 2025 at 3:31 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Based on a popular novel of the same name, director Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield (2025) promises fun. To riff on the immortal Dr. Steve Brule: you’ve got corn. You’ve got clowns. What more could a person want? Craig’s picture does indeed supply both cornfields and an army of killer clowns wielding everything from shovels and chainsaws to crossbows and hangman’s nooses. This combination should make for a rip-roaring good time. In fits and starts, it does. But I... Read more

Kids: Nothing’s the Matter with Kids Today

Last updated on: May 11, 2025 at 4:21 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Becoming a young cinephile in the aughts and early 2010s meant seeking out Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). Its writer, Harmony Korine, had gone on to disgust and inspire a generation raised on LiveLeak and the Pain Olympics. Rumored to be the uncut product of his young genius, Kids offered access to reality, an authenticity edited away even on scandal-obsessed daytime TV. Even then, it reeked of indie, of a world bygone, if only because I never would’ve been cool enough... Read more

Don’t Skip Skipped Parts?

Last updated on: May 4, 2025 at 3:21 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Or maybe you should? It’s hard to say. At only 1.5k logs on Letterboxd, Tamra Davis’ Skipped Parts (2000) languishes in the great DVD Library of Alexandria, preserved but seldom and ill seen. Few movies have ever had the same effect on me. It’s a mummy, a statue of the Buddha from Edo Period Japan, an invitation to CBGBs printed on crumbled, thin paper. Skipped Parts is a relic of a society bygone. That’s why I must recommend it—for professional... Read more

The McPherson Tape: Do You Believe?

Last updated on: April 27, 2025 at 4:10 pm By Chase Padusniak

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When I saw the first Paranormal Activity (2007), I knew it wasn’t real. But, at the tender age of 13, I wanted it to be. Its elaborate pretension that, yes, this had all happened and that, yes, we have just been so lucky because the house’s cameras were turned on, helped. It gave me permission to suspend disbelief and to enjoy what amounted to a play on the found-footage film. Under a decade earlier, The Blair Witch Project (1999) did... Read more

Drop: Date-Night Thrills

Last updated on: April 20, 2025 at 1:08 pm By Chase Padusniak

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I hesitate to say the “movies are back” because I think anyone paying sufficient attention knows cinema must change. There’s no going back to pre-COVID, pre-streaming. We can return to neither the New nor the Old Hollywood. No river stepped in at different times, etc. But I’m human, and I confess missing the mid-budget audience pleaser. Not everything needs to be Stan Brakhage or even Paul Thomas Anderson. Drop (2025) pretends to be nothing more than what it is: a... Read more

Volver: Light on the Melodrama

Last updated on: April 14, 2025 at 3:13 pm By Chase Padusniak

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It feels bad to say, “it just didn’t connect with me.” Where there is technical brilliance, there is not always emotional connection. Sometimes this experience stems from emptiness, the so-called “exercise in style.” Not always, though. On occasion, I can watch a movie, appreciate its technical merits, marvel at the performances, respect its script, and still come away devoid of feeling. All the worse when this is a melodrama like Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006). As with many of Almodóvar’s films,... Read more

Fight Club: The Middle Child of History

Last updated on: April 9, 2025 at 3:32 pm By Chase Padusniak

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There’s really no way to “review” Fight Club (1999), a movie at this point so famous and so abundantly discussed that it belongs more to the pages of an Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book than to my blog. Fight Club is the harbinger of the Trumpian right. Fight Club is the toxic man’s mainstay. Fight Club is a pretty dang good movie. Fight Club is the pit in the American stomach. What more is there to say? Yesterday, for an... Read more