From left to right: Callum Turner, Alia Shawkat, and Anton Yelchin in Green Room Alex Brannan takes a stage dive into how the 2015 thriller explores ideas of identity and authenticity with its conceit of a punk band fighting for their lives. The means of arrival at the horrific circumstances at the center of Green… Read more »
Kristin Calabrese as Mary, the eponymous killer, in I Was a Teenage Serial Killer Alex Brannan champions the rebellious ethos and audacious feminism of two works by underground film icon Sarah Jacobson. “We’re gonna f*ck sh*t up!” According to IndieWire, this was a phrase filmmaker Sarah Jacobson would repeat “with a big smile, to the… Read more »
“Frendo the Clown” stalks teens in a cornfield in Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield Alex Brannan takes a look at the clever interrogation of technology in a throwback slasher starring a bloodthirsty clown and a bone-chilling thriller from Canada. The Cinema’s upcoming double feature of Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield and Pascal Plante’s… Read more »
Robert Pattinson as both Mickey 18 and Mickey 17 in Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 Alex Brannan extols the virtues of Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s unfairly maligned follow-up to his Oscar-winning smash Parasite. Bong Joon-ho, the long-treasured South Korean filmmaker whose films whimsically dance around the boundaries of genre, received perhaps his biggest acclaim after his… Read more »
Michael B. Jordan as characters Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners Alex Brannan considers the current state of independence and auteurism in American cinema. We could begin by saying that the auteur theory is, always has been, flimsy. This is to say: the question of whether a film contains a singular author is never… Read more »
Neil Patrick Harris as Colonel Carl Jenkins, Denise Richards as Carmen Ibanez, and Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico Alex Brannan explains how Starship Troopers, both Robert Heinlein’s book and Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation, operates in a satiric mode that can make it easy to miss its darker implications. The cover of my copy of… Read more »