Shallow Grave: Tale as Old as Time

Last updated on: July 13, 2025 at 2:22 pm By Chase Padusniak

It’s a tale as old as time. People—sometimes crooks, sometimes friends, sometimes virtuous—come into possession of money. Perhaps they’ve killed someone. Maybe they chance upon a sack, bulging with cash. In all cases, the treasure tears them apart. Often they kill each other in creative ways. The moral is clear: money severs all ties. It breeds suspicion. In Chaucer’s Pardoner’s version, the tale takes the form of a sermon. His topic: radix malorum est cupiditas. Cupidity is the root of... Read more

Dude, Where’s My Car?

Last updated on: July 6, 2025 at 2:54 pm By Chase Padusniak

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I was six, going on seven for most of 2000. The millennium is a mystery to me. My best recollection consists of a redheaded pizza delivery boy sulking into a suicide booth only to reappear amid floating cars and chrome sheen. That year implies, however, something else—Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000)—a stoner comedy featuring Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott. I could barely play computer games at the time. But the title stuck in mind, and, like its main characters,... Read more

Marie Antoinette: Let Them Eat Diamonds

Last updated on: June 28, 2025 at 9:52 am By Chase Padusniak

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Confession: the only Sofia Coppola movie I’d seen until last week was The Bling Ring (2013). Confession: I didn’t care for The Bling Ring. Confession: of the three Coppola joints set before me in the last week—her best-known films from The Virgin Suicides (1998) through the subject of this essay—only one resonated. One spoke to me, cried out and found a listening ear. The phrase? Let them eat cake! I remember when Marie Antoinette (2006) came out, and I was... Read more

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

Last updated on: June 22, 2025 at 9:44 am By Chase Padusniak

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For those not in the know, If Footmen Tire you, What Will Horses Do? (1971) is a miraculous historical survival. Directed by an exploitation filmmaker turned evangelical Christian, Ron Ormond, the movie nearly disappeared forever. Only in 2018 did experts clean up an old copy. Ormond worked with aptly named fundamentalist Baptist preacher Estes W. Pirkle to produce one of the minister’s sermons. Their collaboration produced a singular work of art. Dead children, communists telling kids to pray to Fidel... Read more

Materialists: Manhattan Psycho Meet Cute

Last updated on: June 16, 2025 at 2:25 pm By Chase Padusniak

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The way I see it, there are four ways to explain my reaction to Celine Song’s sophomore effort, Materialists (2025): It is trying to “do something” and fails miserably. It is not trying to “do something” and fails miserably. I am a tasteless fraud so singularly out of step with the very concept of art that I should bury myself alive. It’s not for me. 3) is out for personal reasons. 4) seems possible, though, if it is “for someone,”... Read more

The Dark Backward: A Freakish Touch

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

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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