Holding Over for the Holidays

Last updated on: December 11, 2023 at 5:35 pm By Chase Padusniak

“Holding Over,” I gather, is what boarding schoolers call getting stuck on campus during a break. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023) concerns two people in just that situation: an ancient civilizations teacher named Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) and a kind-hearted rebellious student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa). Bleak as the premise and the wintry weather of the Christmastide Massachusetts setting may be, this movie is a heartwarming, energizing watch, a tale as old as time: two people who can barely stand... Read more

Alferd Packer and the Bloody Bunch

Last updated on: December 8, 2023 at 2:04 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Before there was South Park (1997-Present) there was Cannibal! The Musical (1993), Trey Parker’s directorial debut while still a film student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Distributed by beloved cheapo gore-purveying Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Entertainment, Cannibal is a gem of student filmmaking (not that that’s a high bar). Here is a land of contrasts: avant-garde filmmaker (and apparently the only faculty member who encouraged the film’s production) Stan Brakhage has a cameo alongside flesh-hungry ghouls and an upbeat... Read more

Rubbing Salt in the Wound

Last updated on: December 6, 2023 at 11:10 am By Chase Padusniak

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I’ll do my best to stop this from becoming a screed. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (2023) is a fun movie rooted in tried material. For its first 90 minutes, I was engaged, laughing, oo-ing, ah-ing, and even staring in shock. This tale of a beleaguered scholarship student and nerd named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) who strikes up a lucky friendship with an aristocratic Oxford collegemate, Felix (Jacob Elordi), kept me on my feet. The movie’s beginning presents Ollie as a crestfallen... Read more

War Economy for the Occupied

Last updated on: November 27, 2023 at 6:27 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Liliana Cavani’s The Skin (1981) only has 13 user reviews on IMDb, three of which are from American soldiers who played extras in the film (or their children). None of the military once-overs deal with its content, and at least one recounts how grunts who saw the movie upon release spent its runtime Where’s Waldoing themselves. I cannot imagine a more powerful indication of the film’s success. It sets out to show the realities of Neapolitan life under Allied... Read more

Howdy, Pilgrim

Last updated on: November 20, 2023 at 4:14 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving (2023) is a holiday success story. This is your classic popcorn slasher, a diverting blend of blood and laughs to go with your salty treats ‘fore the big screen. We’ve got shocking kills, eye-popping gore (with some practical effects!), and a mystery that holds its own. In the spirit of 80s and 90s slashers, it’s willing to be funny and irreverent without pretending to be something it’s not. That’s what really makes this gem about a man... Read more

Repetition Blow Out

Last updated on: November 16, 2023 at 7:57 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) begins where it ends. On its surface, there’s nothing all that remarkable about this fact. You might even call it “effective leveraging of form” or simply “good writing.” In more heavily declined languages like German, the first position in a sentence is emphatic. Wir gehen jetzt. Jetzt gehen wir. The latter emphasizes the “now.” It might better be translated “get your ass in gear” or “I’m offended. We’re out.” In Latin, both the alpha... Read more

Pop Music Hell

Last updated on: November 10, 2023 at 4:37 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Another movie about would-be celebrity self-immolation? We’ve got Showgirls (1996), Mulholland Drive (2001), and many others besides. If you take 2018’s Vox Lux to be a tale of the entertainment system and its discontents, you could be forgiven for disliking the film. Natalie Portman’s Staten Island accent leaves something to be desired (I should know; I’ve got two siblings raised there). The story’s beats are nothing new: sleep with your manager, get addicted to pills, feel the slow metamorphosis from... Read more

How Was the Play, Mrs. Kennedy?

Last updated on: October 31, 2023 at 4:27 pm By Chase Padusniak

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“There was blood upon her white dress, and the signs of her terrible efforts to escape were upon every part of her thin form.” – Poe “Victorie, my liege, and that with little losse.” – Kyd The House of Yes (1997) is hilarious. That might seem like the wrong word for a movie about a family broken apart on the day of JFK’s assassination. The father left that day. There are three Pascal children. Two are twins, Marty (Josh Hamilton)... Read more

Digital Phantoms

Last updated on: October 24, 2023 at 2:30 pm By Chase Padusniak

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The Net (1995) is a Cassandra of a film, if Cassandra’s curse were to be right about the future but to be so thoroughly pat and anodyne that no one would care. Coming in at almost two hours, most of this Sandra Bullock-driven thriller watches like a script pumped out by an AI trained on half-shredded copies of a Tom Clancy novel stuck in a big, beige printer. There are a couple notable, all-too-notably-human exceptions. Thank God for those. The... Read more

The Monsters Are Inside the Living Room

Last updated on: October 18, 2023 at 3:46 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Voyeurism is one of those things. Most of us don’t peep through people’s windows or scan from a park bench looking for rustling in high grass. But the ubiquity of online porn, the way our heads turn at the swirling red lights at the side of the road—most of all the psychic enchantment of movies and TV—suggest an affirmative answer to the killer website’s question in FeardotCom (2002): do you like to watch? Cinema has notoriously furrowed its brow at... Read more