Quick question for y’all: is “my brain has been hijacked by this fictional story and I no longer know how to live in the real world” a valid reason to call in sick to work? I’ve always gotten immersed in stories in a way that blurred the lines […]
Travis Stevens’A Wounded Fawn (USA, 2022) is entirely my thing. It’s a nice mix of art house and genre, which is one of my favorite things. It blends fine art—in this case the art of Surrealists (and friends) Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna—1970s horror/giallo, Classical Greek […]
Video game adaptations have a rocky history in film. For every good-to-ok one, like Mortal Kombat (1994), Sonic The Hedgehog (2020) or Werewolves Within (2021), there are scores of films that don’t do justice to their digital counterparts. The K:D ratio* just isn’t great for these movies, partly […]
Dobaaraa, a Hindi-language film released earlier this year, stands in intriguing contrast to mainstream Indian cinema’s habits, not just in how this compelling remake handles it source material but also just more generally as a contemporary project. It is one of only a handful of Indian adaptations of […]
I’ve been thinking about what “disreputable art” means in a time when nerds, fans, and geeks have won a kind of cultural hegemony. It was different when the Cultural Gutter was founded in 2003, before Iron Man (2008) launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Force awakened, and the […]
“I don’t wanna quit, I just wanna be in control of it” – Becky Something, Her Smell (2018) Some movies challenge you. Difficult to watch, grappling with heady or uncomfortable themes or ideas, or just straight-up disorienting as the stupid camera swirls around like you’re on the Gravitron […]