Christine Kelley

The Thing startles me whenever I revisit it every year or two. It's not that I forget that it's brilliant — whenever I think of great horror films, The Thing is one of the first three or four movies that pop into my head. But perhaps I'm prone to recalling a few moments from it rather than the thing

Patreon is finally making me switch to monthly billing. I'm not sure when the new plan starts, but it looks like our new monthly tiers will be: $1 -> 5 $ 2 -> 10 $5 -> 25 I want to emphasize that this isn't a serious change for most of you. If you pay $1 per essay from me, and I write five essays pe

One can't pinpoint a single defining moment in The Godfather where Michael Corleone turns from a warm and decent young American into a monster of post-war capitalism. The same instincts that drive him to care for his family and protect his father lead him to become a Machiavellian neo-feudal lord wh

No film has loved God quite like Ken Russell's The Devils. It exalts His great priest Urbain Grandier by casting sex icon Oliver Reed in his part and making him the moral center of the film. He is of course an imperfect moral center — this is a man who sleeps with and impregnates his pupil (perhaps

The Exorcist III has a confounding and tormented relationship with The Exorcist. William Peter Blatty clearly wants to direct an adaptation of his novel Legion rather than to assiduously fashion a reverent sequel to one of the greatest horror films of all time. While Friedkin's The Exorcist was a do

The raid on the castle in Akira Kurosawa's Ran marks the moment that cinema fulfills the promise of Battleship Potemkin. Kurosawa chooses to play the scene without sound, with only Tōru Takemitsu's haunting occidental score to accompany the horrors of the battle. Tatsuya Nakadai's Lord Hidetora runs

Interesting in retrospect to look at posters for this that prominently feature Marilyn Monroe, who only has about 47 seconds of screentime. Monroe makes her relatively small part sing, turning a complacent squeeze into a giddy and tormented accomplice. You can see glimpses of her future brilliant pe

After directing his stomach-churning magnum opus The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston reunited with Humphrey Bogart for a similarly queasy but less confident voyage to the outskirts of America in Key Largo. The film is poorly served by the comparison to Sierra Madre — Key Largo suffers from

Screened on 16mm by my friends Bob and Cara for their monthly movie night. Thanks, Bob and Cara. The lembas was the finest I've ever had. In The Hobbit, Tolkien concludes one of the finest chapters he ever wrote with a mix of tenderness and suspense. "Riddles in the Dark" ends with Bilbo, frightened

A decade before he revolutionized cyberpunk and cracked an armada of eggs with Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii made a film about a different sort of egg. Oshii's Angel's Egg is perhaps his finest work: a beautifully oppressive depiction of a world ravaged by cataclysm. Its characters are so overwhe

My girlfriend Janet got to see Taxi Driver for the first time on Sunday evening. She had a hard time with it; while she praised the movie as a whole, she visibly and rightly cringed every time Travis attempted to interact with Betsy or Iris. I, on the other hand, laughed my ass off through these sce

After his technically impressive but slightly daft directorial debut, Satoshi Kon comes into his own with his second movie. Millennium Actress deserves to be ranked among the best Japanese films, including Ugetsu, High and Low, Tokyo Story, and Harakiri. The movie begins as an elegy for 20th Century

My girlfriend and I caught a fairly well-attended Wednesday night screening of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The audience was perhaps less queer than we expected if the paucity of blue hair dye in the room was any indication. The audience was largely college students looking to catch the new

Christopher Nolan's protagonists are frequently egomaniacs in a race against the clock to become the best in their field. Rarely do his characters find themselves in such a bloody battle as they do in The Prestige, in which two stage magicians competing to craft the perfect illusion leave a trail of

Castle in the Sky sees Western fiction lover Hayao Miyazaki reach new heights of occidentalism, at times playing like a laundry list of his favorite Western adventure stories. The movie explicitly states Laputa's debt to Gulliver's Travels early on. The influence of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules

The People's Joker is the finest superhero film since The Dark Knight Rises. Like the other four or five superhero films with anything interesting to say, it is a hot mess. Vera Drew's avant-garde parody/indie queer coming-of-age drama careens through a zany (if grounded) procession of disparate sty

The 1995 indie horror film Mute Witness goes through three distinct phases. The first and shortest is its opening scene, a suitably lurid and unexpectedly well-shot slasher which concludes with its murder victim thrashing around her apartment as she bleeds to death, knocking over every piece of furn

Charlie Kaufman may be commonly placed in the Postmodernist Writers camp (a nebulous faction by any definition), but based on the evidence of Being John Malkovich, he clearly has a lot in common with cyberpunk writers. The portal to Malkovich (a gloriously stupid rendition of the portal to faerie th

It was always going to start with the Trojan Horse. Christopher Nolan, process nerd extraordinaire and specialist in Western civilization’s favorite images (the atomic bomb, the superhero), could not tackle Homer’s Odyssey without depicting the most famous piece of tradecraft in the history of story

After scoring a surprise hit with The Elephant Man and a fascinating failure with Dune, Lynch returns to Weird Shit territory with Blue Velvet. While the film at first blush can feel like a return to the abstract horror of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet is David Lynch's most classic Hollywood film to date.

Well, it's not on par with Troy McClure's Alice Doesn't Live Anymore, but even Scorsese can't make better movies that ones we can only imagine. If Mean Streets was Scorsese's attempt to reckon with the violence of his childhood in The Bowery, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore Scorsese breaks out of hi

Kafka meticulously translated the horrors of his time into fables with a strong sense of placelessness. The Trial is clearly the product of a German-speaking Jew in Prague wrestling with the occupation of Bohemia by Austria-Hungary and the regime changes brought by World War I. While you can can see

A Hidden Life is not simply a return to scripted narrative filmmaking for Terrence Malick, but his first substantial engagement with the themes of his earlier work since The Tree of Life. The Thin Red Line is perhaps the most obvious point of comparison with its World War II setting and its focus on

Early in Lav Diaz's Magellan, Portuguese conquidator Dom Albuquerque sits in the ruins of a Malaysian village he has just wiped out. He proceeds to pronounce his intention to raze Mecca and Medina, wiping out Islam, and making Christianity the dominant religion of the world again. From there he will

Four years after making his magnum opus, Spielberg has returned to apparently familiar ground. Disclosure Day is strikingly retro: a properly Spielbergian adventure story about extra-terrestrials serving as ambassadors for a universe that's warm and benevolent if human beings can get past the threat

There's a tension in Oliver Stone's Nixon between the absurdity of the real history it depicts and the flourishes and excesses of its director. Near the end, Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins), knowing his political career is over, asks Henry Kissinger (Paul Sorvino) to join him in prayer, and they kne

Like all great directors, Hitchcock understood that plots making strict logical sense is less vital to a movie's artistic success than creating good and memorable scenes that constitute a powerful experience. Never is this more clear than in Vertigo, a brilliant shitshow with a nonsensically convolu

Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc has no grand visions of heaven. God himself does not appear to comfort Joan as she is systematically tortured and murdered by the Catholic Church of France. We do not witness Joan's heyday as a leader of France or her victories in battle. We only see

Wall Street is obsessed with patriarchy. From the casting of Sheens Martin and Charlie to one of Hollywood's finer nepo babies as one of Hollywood's great psychos to Oliver Stone's clear agony over having been raised by a Wall Street yuppie, the film is replete with dysfunctional father-son relation

Terrence Malick's world is not anthropocene. It is a world in which man exists in continuity with — or has broken its link to — flora and fauna. Shots of troopers hiding in the vegetation of Guadalcanal are intercut with a chameleon climbing a tree. The human carnage of battle is interrupted by a sh

The atmosphere of Chile in 1973 is electric. The revolutionary government of Salvador Allende has handed working class Chileans a way of living which allows many of them to consciously foster aspirations for the first time. The crew of Patricio Guzmán's The Battle of Chile, some of whom are new to f

The Bourne Identity captures a strange moment in the history of espionage. The Cold War is over; the War on Terror is creeping into sight. America has defeated its external enemies. Capitalist realism is the law of the world. With no great adversary after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is forc

All About Eve lays its cards on the table immediately. It opens on an award ceremony honoring Eve (Anne Baxter), the new darling of the theater scene. We are treated to voice-over narration by theater critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), a figure of dreadful divine authority in this world. We the

Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.) emerges from prison after an unspecified period of time for an offense which is also unspecified but implied to be related to his drinking. He takes in Eva (Eva Mattes), a sex worker who's suffering abuse from her pimps. Their neighbor Scheitz (Clemen Scheitz) gradually spi

Elaine May's previous films had largely been character-driven relationship comedies starring character actors as put-upon smucks [sic] in extremely stressful life-altering situations. Ishtar is not much of a departure for May in this regard, but its scale certainly is. While her previous movies were

I can't recall if I've written this somewhere, but a friend's mother once told me that she knows many attorneys who are also romance novelists. She attributed this to a romantic story being an argument for why two people should be together. By the same token, screwball comedies are vociferous argume

No Country for Old Men follows a series of hunts. Anton Chigurh is tracking $2 million in cash, which carries a transponder which seems to guarantee that he'll discover it eventually. Llewelyn Moss begins the movie on a literal hunt, wandering the plains of West Texas for antelope (he misses his pre

The events of the third act of Straw Dogs are perceived in radically different lights by the film's protagonists. David (Dustin Hoffman) believes his wife is callously asking him to offer disabled country boy Henry (David Warner) to a band of West Country psychopaths trying to break into their home.

Throughout its first half, Hamnet had me wondering where objective judgment ended and my own personal critique began. It's a well-directed movie — Chloé Zhao knows how to shoot quasi-cinema verité. The performances range from very good (Mescal, Watson) to brilliant (Buckley). Shut up, I told myself.

Written for Cinema on the Spectrum. Synopsis John Boorman’s outrageous and operatic masterpiece Excalibur revels in getting to tell the King Arthur story. It refuses to be anything less than the definitive cinematic version of the Matter of Britain. Adapting Thomas Malory’s gargantuan Le Morte d’Art

A couple minor spoilers ahead. Weapons is more indebted to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining than any other horror film I've seen in the last five years. The film is replete with Steadicam shots tracking characters from behind in addition to a sometimes quasi-Wendy Carlos score, themes of the rot of Ame

Distinguishing between how well a movie works and whether or not I enjoyed it usually isn't a problem for me. I can think of many movies I respect on a technical level that I hated watching. What's more difficult is figuring out if a movie that personally upset me a great deal is successful or not.

After creating America's finest horror film to date, George A. Romero tried to avoid typecasting like the radioactive plague. He made There's Always Vanilla, a fascinating half-romcom/half-exploitation movie about the impossibility of surviving in the nuclear family. He then moved onto the feminist

Duplicity is that age old story: a romcom wrapped in a John le Carré novel inside a Steven Moffat script. It is of course written neither by le Carré or Moffat, but it very well could have been. But it's clearly as Tony Gilroy a story as it gets: two reluctant professionals drawn back into the arena

Jafar Panahi's It Was Just An Accident is modern-day samizdat, a film whose clandestine and elicit production is evident in every frame. The film is shot in nooks and alcoves; it is a film that demands to be seen but is afraid to be seen in production. Panahi's hatred of his regime is shared by his

I'm late to the party on this one. Everybody knows The Sting is perfect; I'm the last one to find out. But man, I just finished watching The Sting for the first time and I'm almost deliriously happy. I don't think I've felt like this since I watched Michael Clayton for the first time. What a treat.

Some time ago I wrote something about Hitchcock failing to stick the landing with his endings. I think I was talking out of my ass; he's quite capable of ending a movie the right away. Sure, Psycho and Shadow of a Doubt suffer from having their best scenes in the middle of their run times, but Verti

I rarely love Guillermo del Toro movies, but I'm always glad when they come out. The man is a cinnamon roll who makes pretty films about how monsters deserve love too. They're not always good, but they're almost always endearing. Frankenstein is closer to the Crimson Peak end of the GDT spectrum tha

The Hays Code took away not just filmmakers' freedom of speech but, to a large extent, their ability to explore character relationships with nuance and discernment. While not free of propagandistic elements, pre-Code films are more willing to depict relationships as complicated or ugly or free from

Spielberg has always had good timing. He waited until the War on Terror to adapt Philip K. Dick's story about preventive detention and warrantless surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security was founded a few months after Minority Report's premiere. Congress passed the Patriot Act while the fi