For about thirty minutes, I had no idea what was happening in Affection. A woman wakes up in a house she doesn’t recognize, in a bed she’s never slept in, next to a man who looks at her like she belongs to him. She tries to run. He stops her, not violently, not at first, … Read more
I’ll tell you the exact moment I knew this wasn’t going to work. Episode two. There’s a scene where the patients at New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital are huddled together at night, and something is moving in the hallway outside the ward. You can hear it. The lights are wrong. Nobody’s talking. And then, right then, … Read more
My wife walked through the room during the third episode and asked what I was watching. I told her. She sat down. She didn’t leave for two hours. That’s not a review, but it’s something. What Starz has done with Amadeus or more accurately, what writer Joe Barton has done, is take a story everybody thinks … Read more
About forty minutes into Mortal Kombat II, Karl Urban does the splits and punches a man in the testicles. It’s the best moment in the film. It will be on social media before the credits finish rolling, which is, I suspect, partially the point, and also partially the problem. Urban is genuinely funny in this … Read more
I don’t know how to describe this film to someone who hasn’t seen it. I’ve tried three times in conversation and each time the other person’s face does the thing where they’re being polite. A Hungarian art film. Three timelines. A ginkgo tree that’s been on a German university campus since 1832. Tony Leung injecting … Read more
I’ve read the book twice. Once at fourteen, when my English teacher assigned it and I found it thrilling in the way that fourteen-year-olds find things thrilling all surface, all Lord of the Flies Greatest Hits. Once at thirty, when I understood what Golding was actually doing and found it considerably harder to finish. I … Read more
RZA spent thirteen years trying to get this film made. Thirteen years. I think about that a lot while watching it not because the film feels labored, exactly, but because you can feel the weight of that time in it, all that accumulated fury looking for the right shape and not entirely finding one. The … Read more