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Review: 'Eileen'

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Buried alive in snowy, small-town Massachusetts, Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) is a sputtering cherry bomb ready to pop. At age 20-something, she's employed as an office paper-pusher at a local juvie lockup for wayward boys, where she entertains carnal thoughts about certain of the guards and inmates, and at night drives out to park in the ...Read more

Review: 'Thanksgiving' or Fright Night Revisited

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Horror comedies are tricky. The quest for laughs in these pictures tends to destabilize the scary stuff. Like, has anyone ever wished there were a couple more chuckles in "Alien," or a fart joke in "Frankenstein"? Once humor becomes a pressing concern in a fright flick, the familiar pleasures of terror become technical exercises.

There's ...Read more

Review: 'Albert Brooks: Defending My Life' is The King of Comedy

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

The new HBO documentary "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life" is of course a journey into the world of the quietly brilliant comedy giant of the title. Starting out, we see Brooks doing one of his early bits on some back-in-the-day TV show -- Carson, Leno, Merv Griffin, one of those; Albert played them all in the days when he still did stand-up. ...Read more

Review: 'Another Body' Crawls Inside the Cruel World of Deepfake Porn

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Three years ago, a Connecticut college student named Taylor Klein received a DM from a friend. "I'm really sorry," it said, "but I think you need to see this." Attached was a link to a Pornhub page -- an odd thing to send to a straight-arrow engineering major like Klein. Opening it, she saw a video of a young woman having sex -- a young woman ...Read more

Review: 'The Killer' and 'Satan Wants You' - David Fincher's New Hitman Feature and a Look Back at the Satanic Panic of the 1980s

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

The new David Fincher movie "The Killer" is an exercise in hard-boiled style. The story, drawn from a French graphic novel, is perfunctory and the peripatetic location-hopping (Paris, New Orleans, the Dominican Republic) is a familiar emblem of action-flick filmmaking. What makes the picture work to the extent that it does are Fincher's virtuoso...Read more

Review: 'Killers of the Flower Moon' or More Money, More Problems

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

"Killers of the Flower Moon" is a Martin Scorsese movie with little in the way of classic Scorsese signifiers -- no snarling New York gangsters, no steaming Manhattan hellscapes. No New York at all, in fact. The picture is based on David Grann's 2017 book about a wave of murders of Native Americans in Oklahoma's Osage Nation in the 1920s, and ...Read more

Review: 'In Happily Never After,' Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun in a Story of Missed Romantic Connections

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

"Cat Person" is a horror movie in which the source of the horror is never quite clear. The lead characters -- Margot (Emilia Jones, of "CODA"), a 20-year-old college student, and Robert ("Succession's" Nicholas Braun), an enigmatic older man -- are drawn to each other but can never quite come together. An opening on-screen quote, attributed to ...Read more

Review: 'A Haunting in Venice' or Murder Most Spooky

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

The most mysterious thing about "A Haunting in Venice," Kenneth Branagh's latest Agatha Christie adaptation, is how such a beautifully made movie could also be such a weary and unengaging disappointment. Like Branagh's two previous Christie films -- "Murder on the Orient Express" (2017) and "Death on the Nile" (2022), both of which he also ...Read more

Review: 'My Animal' or Wolfing Out

Entertainment / Kurt Loder /

Talk about nonbinary. The protagonist of "My Animal," a horror-romance by first-time feature director Jacqueline Castel, is not just preoccupied with her blossoming lesbian nature, but also, at regular, moon-triggered intervals, her inner werewolf as well.

This girl's name is Heather (Bobbi Salvor Menuez) and she lives a dull, chilly life in ...Read more

 

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