‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Drips with Danger and Desire
Rose Glass drenches Love Lies Bleeding in sensation and texture, as if she dragged the film through pools of viscera on the floor of a Foley sound effects studio.
Chris Barsanti
Chris Barsanti is a freelance writer, editor, consultant, and aspiring flâneur. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society, he has been published in the Chicago Tribune, The Hollywood Reporter, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and Rain Taxi Review of Books, among other outlets. His books include Six Seasons and a Movie: How Community Broke Television, Monty Python FAQ, The Ballot Box: 10 Presidential Elections That Changed American History, and The Sci-Fi Movie Guide.
Christopher Hitchens and Fights Worth Having
You can smell the cigarette ash and Johnnie Walker Black Label on the pages of A Hitch in Time, a gleefully pugilistic posthumous Christopher Hitchens anthology.
The Old Days Were Outrageous – You Couldn’t Say Anything
History of offense, protest, and censorship Outrageous is more of a clip show but also a riotous reminder that nothing in the cancel culture wars is new.
Modern-Day Minstrelsy in Cord Jefferson’s ‘American Fiction’
Cord Jefferson’s provocative satire on race and literature, American Fiction, skewers modern-day minstrelsy and performative allyship.
John le Carré Gives No Truth, Only Betrayal in ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’
Errol Morris’ The Pigeon Tunnel follows a wily, cynical, yet chipper John le Carré down a rabbit hole of Cold War moral ambiguity.
Pablo Larraín’s ‘El Conde’ Dilutes the Real Horror of Pinochet
Pablo Larraín’s fascist vampire analogy El Conde somehow trivializes the Pinochet monstrosity at its core.
Comedy Series ‘The Afterparty’ Is Among the Last of Its Kind
The second season of Apple TV’s funny, inventive, and self-indulgent comedy whodunnit The Afterparty is utterly unnecessary in the best way.
Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’ Subverts the One Crazy Night Genre
In Martin Scorsese’s 1985 art punk gem After Hours, a yuppie lost in SoHo is terrorized not so much by the late-night characters but by the city itself.
Who Is the Monster in Claire Dederer’s ‘Monsters’?
In Monsters, Claire Dederer explores how fans’ “dumb love” of art can exist with “heartbreak” and unresolved feelings about monstrous artists.
It’s Too Hot to Hate in Climate Change Series ‘Extrapolations’
Scott Z. Burns’ audacious if dramatically uneven climate-change Apple TV+ series shows that while the Earth will change radically, people will not.
The ‘Master Gardener’ Is Another Paul Schrader Bad Guy with a Gun and a Past
In Master Gardener, Paul Schrader uses the curiously arch story of an ex-White Power killer hiding out as a gardener to deliver another story of a lonely avenger seeking absolution through violence.
Ben Affleck’s Nike/Michael Jordan Film ‘Air’ Tries to Elevate Marketing
Ben Affleck’s ridiculously crowd-pleasing Jerry Maguire-like movie Air, about Nike landing Michael Jordan, makes a nearly too-late pivot into meaningful marketing.