There’s a reason Richard Peppiatt’s Kneecap was nominated for Sundance’s Innovator Award, and it’s not just the way scribbles, illustrations and on-screen text mirror the film’s bold, bird-flipping tone. It’s the way the director—co-writing with his leads—fictionalizes the Irish band’s origin story to embrace Ireland’s rebellious, bird-flipping history.
“Every word spoken in Irish is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.”
It’s 2019 and activists in the North of Ireland are hard at work making the Irish language an official national tongue. But there’s nothing official, nothing hard working about the way two hedonistic youths put it to use in their hip hop.
Less than Orange v Green, less even than the familial tensions that drive a great deal of the story, the conflict between respectability and the anarchic spirit of the Irish is what fuels Peppiatt’s film.
Móglaí Bap (playing himself), along with best pal Mo Chara (also as himself), learned the language at the knee of his father (Michael Fassbender), who happened to be an IRA bomber that would disappear or die—no one’s sure which—not too many years into those lessons.
Here lies the fiction, no doubt. But it’s a brilliant way to layer in the history of a land’s volatile spirit. Peppiatt and his co-conspirators have no interest in sanitizing this hero’s journey. Before Kneecap could become the hip hop revolutionaries that galvanized the island’s youth around the native language by rapping only in Irish, they had to become a trio. And that couldn’t happen until Mo Chara could meet disinterested music teacher JJ (actual bandmate DJ Próval), an Irish translator sent to his aid after his drug arrest.
It merits remarking that all three bandmates make fine actors. Mo Chara is mischievously charming and DJ Próval comes off as a veteran. Their unlikely camaraderie is infectious, amplified by the audacious energy that propels the film.
Peppiatt takes a band’s origin story, wraps it in cultural trauma, globalizes it and creates a rebel song the North of Ireland can be proud of.
Winner of the audience award at Sundance this year, Kneecap is a hard film not to like. As utterly and unapologetically Irish as the film is, it is also blisteringly universal. Every culture is built on our stories. Every story needs a language.
You can’t blame a film for not being what you hoped it was going to be. The fact that your goals don’t match the filmmaker’s goals doesn’t mean the film is less than it should be, just that the filmmaker had their own plan and if you want to see the movie you hoped for, it’s up to you to make it.
The idea of Eddie Izzard playing Dr. Jekyll is tantalizing, bursting with possibilities as a statement on being trans—sort of I Saw the TV Glow but goth. This is an amazing idea and a movie I’d like to see. And Dr. Jekyll is a Hammer Horror, which makes it sound like even more fun.
It is not. Not a meditation on being trans—an unfortunate waste of an opportunity, but if that wasn’t in the filmmakers’ plans, so be it. But it’s also not fun, not anything worth your time. What a waste.
Izzard does all she can with the role of reclusive Big Pharma billionaire Dr. Nina Jekyll. Jekyll’s assistant and only connection to the outside world—the always welcome Lindsay Duncan—is looking for a live in caregiver. Somehow, Rob (Scott Chambers) lands an interview. It was a mistake, never meant to happen, can’t imagine how he wasn’t vetted.
Jekyll takes an immediate shine to the goofy ex-con and hires him, against her assistant’s stern warning. But is it really Jekyll at all?
Izzard has a bit of fun with both characters and all’s well enough as long as she’s on screen. But at no time does director Joe Stephenson offer any reason to have revisited Robert Louis Stevenson’s old id/superego story.
First time screenwriter Dan Kelly-Mulhern tosses the source material in the bin but can come up with no relevant or interesting new twist, even though a tantalizing possibility is staring him in the face.
Chambers is certainly likeable enough in the role of doofus caregiver, but ex con with a guilty conscience and dark past? Not buying it for a second, which makes the character’s arc borderline ridiculous and Chambers lacks the chops to elevate the material.
The story itself is nothing but holes. With nary a coherent thread of story line to cling to, Izzard’s charm and wicked humor are in service of nothing. It’s almost offensive that RLS gets a writing credit.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Not according to these filmmakers. The lingering dread, the confusion and horror, the madness! So much great horror has sprung from that fear of losing your mind. In fact, there are so many great options that we got a little crazy.
We want to thank our special guest Scott Woods as well as our partner Ginger Nuts of Horror for this mad, mad episode!
5. Vampire’s Kiss (1988)
Sure, Nicolas Cage is a whore, a has-been, and his wigs embarrass us all. But back before The Rock (the film that turned him), Cage was always willing to behave in a strangely effeminate manner, and perhaps even eat a bug. He made some great movies that way.
Peter Lowe (pronounced with such relish by Cage) believes he’s been bitten by a vampire (Jennifer Beals) during a one night stand. It turns out, he’s actually just insane. The bite becomes his excuse to indulge his self-obsessed, soulless, predatory nature for the balance of the running time.
Cage gives a masterful comic performance in Vampire’s Kiss as a narcissistic literary editor who descends into madness. The actor is hilarious, demented, his physical performance outstanding. The way he uses his gangly mess of limbs and hulking shoulders inspires darkly, campy comic awe. And the plastic teeth are awesome.
Peter may believe he abuses his wholesome editorial assistant Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso) with sinister panache because he’s slowly turning into a demon, but we know better.
4. In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Sutter Cane may be awfully close to Stephen King, but John Carpenter’s cosmic horror is even more preoccupied by Lovecraft. The great Sam Neill leads a fun cast in a tale of madness as created by the written world.
Neill is an insurance investigator out to prove that vanished author Sutter Cane is a phony. He just needs to get to Hobb’s End and prove it. There’s a scene with a bicyclist on a country road that boasts of Carpenter’s genre magic, as madness and mayhem collude to keep Neill where he is, at least until he can serve a greater purpose.
What if those horror novels you read became reality? What if that sketchy writer with the maybe-too-vivid imagination was not just got to his own page, but god for real? This movie tackles that ripe premise while ladling love for both of the horror novelists who made New England the creepiest section of America.
3. Black Swan (2010)
Based on the ballet Swan Lake, which itself is inspired by German folktales The White Duck and The Stolen Veil, Black Swan takes a dark turn.
The potent female counterpoint to Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 gem The Wrestler, Black Swan dances on masochism and self-destruction in pursuit of a masculine ideal.
Natalie Portman won the Oscar for a haunting performance—haunting as much for the physical toll the film appeared to take on the sinewy, hallowed out body as for the mind-bending horror.
Every performance shrieks with the nagging echo of the damage done by this quest to fulfill the unreasonable demands of the male gaze: Barbara Hershey’s plastic and needy mother; Winona Ryder’s picture of self-destruction; Mila Kunis’s dangerous manipulator; Vincent Cassel’s other dangerous manipulator.
The mind-bending descent into madness and death may be the most honest look at ballet we’ve ever seen at the movies.
2. The Shining (1980)
The hypnotic, innocent sound of Danny Torrance’s Big Wheel against the weirdly phallic patterns of the hotel carpet tells so much – about the size of the place, about the monotony of the existence, about hidden perversity. The sound is so lulling that its abrupt ceasing becomes a signal of spookiness afoot.
It’s having an effect on Jack.
As patriarch Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson outdoes himself. His early, veiled contempt blossoms into pure homicidal mania, and there’s something so wonderful about watching Nicholson slowly lose his mind. Between writer’s block, isolation, ghosts, alcohol withdrawal, midlife crisis, and “a momentary loss of muscular coordination,” the playfully sadistic creature lurking inside this husband and father emerges.
What image stays with you most? The two creepy little girls? The blood pouring out of the elevator? The impressive afro in the velvet painting above Scatman Crothers’s bed? That freaky guy in the bear suit? Whatever the answer, thanks be to Kubrick’s deviant yet tidy imagination.
1. The Lighthouse (2019)
Robert Eggars has gone to sea. The Lighthouse strands you, along with two wickies, on the unforgiving island home of one lonely 1890s New England lighthouse.
Salty sea dog Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) keeps the light, mind ye. He also handles among the most impressive briny soliloquies delivered on screen in a lifetime. Joining him as second is one Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson)—aimless, prone to self-abuse, disinclined to appreciate a man’s cooking. Both enjoy a bit of drink.
This is thrilling cinema. Let it in, and it will consume you to the point of nearly missing the deft gothic storytelling at work. The film is other-worldly, surreal, meticulous and consistently creepy.
And we’ll tell you what The Lighthouse is not. It is not a film ye will soon forget.
Perhaps it’s impossible to create a folk horror film that feels truly fresh. Maybe freshness is at odds with the very idea of folk horror. What director Daniel Kokotajlo, adapting Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel Starve Acre, manages in lieu of freshness is an enigmatic slow burn enlivened by memorable performances.
Richard (Matt Smith), Jules (Morfydd Clark) and their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) are settling in. They’ve recently moved into Richard’s childhood home out in the bleak and foggy British countryside circa 1970-something. The fresh air will do Owen good, surely. I mean, nothing maleficent ever happens in situations like these. What could go wrong in a place called Starve Acre?
Unless Richard’s late father—and maybe rugged old neighbor Gordon (Sean Gilder, stellar)—dabbled in child abuse and the occult. Or the old tree trunk that Richard obsessively digs around is some kind of gateway. But what are the odds?
So much of Kokotajlo’s film pulls from existing genre fare: unhappy couple, new home with an ugly past, familial tragedy, father numbs himself with work while mother loses grip on reality.
But a handful of intriguing scenes and conversations, as well as an entire ensemble of strong performances, ensures that the creeping storyline captures and keeps your attention.
Little Arthur Shaw is a heartbreaker, so be prepared. Kokotajlo sidesteps overt gruesomeness to leave an impression that’s even more menacing. Gilder’s a solid salt-of-the-earth presence, offset admirably by Erin Richards. As Jules’s sister Harrie, she’s civility-meets-hardiness and her character feels deeply human and relatable.
But it’s Smith and Clark (the latter who was so astonishing in Rose Glass’s 2019 genre masterpiece, Saint Maud) who carry the film. Both deliver characteristically flawed but tender performances, each commanding the screen without an ounce of showiness.
Careful writing, some fine genre direction and misdirection, and these compelling performances help Starve Acre rise above its spooky familiarity. It’s not enough for Kokotajlo to leave you lying awake and hoping for dawn, but you won’t regret watching.
Is Twisters 100% scientifically realistic? Well, taming tornadoes from inside souped up pickups seems likelier than following up the beautiful, Oscar nominated drama Minari with this movie. But if director Lee Isaac Chung can do that, anything is possible.
Chung’s film, written by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Joseph Kosinski (Tom Cruise’s favorite director, who also wrote the Cruse vehicle Oblivion), follows a new generation of storm chasers.
One team—scientists, PhDs with beta tech in their trunks and data collection on their minds—is led by Javi (Anthony Ramos). And yes, his crew carries degrees from MIT, NASA, ETC. But he can’t do it without Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones).
Team two is a more raucous bunch. Hot YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his fly-by-the-seat-of-your-truck crew don’t need no stinking degrees. But maybe they also need Kate, who balances Team One’s academic expertise with Team Two’s organic know-how.
Kate doesn’t really need either team, which is one mark in the plus column for a film that doesn’t find a lot of ways to break new ground. It does wait a full hour before putting Powell in a white tee shirt in the rain, though, so at least it exerts a little restraint.
It’s fun, though. Is it big dumb fun? Well, I mean, there may be actual science afoot. I wouldn’t know.
Powell’s as effortlessly charismatic as ever, and it continues to be impossible to root against Ramos, who’s conflict and tenderness almost force you to care what happens. Edgar-Jones cuts a fine presence as hero, and the unexpected turns Twisters takes are welcome.
Yes, most of them are expected, but genuinely solid performances from the leads as well as the full ensemble elevate the script. The writing is better than the plot demands, to be entirely fair, but you don’t go to Twisters for the writing.
The action is arresting. Yes, a couple of set pieces look like MGM Studios attractions, but others—the opening sequence, in particular—impress. But Chung is looking for more than action. He gives his film the very throwback vibe of an 80s style blockbuster. It may be an effort to—as one character literally says—“get everyone into the movie theater” but it might work.
Back in 2021, writer/director Damian Mc Carthy cast a spook house spell, rattling chains and all, with his pithy survival story Caveat. He’s back, and with him another claustrophobic but gorgeous supernatural tale of familial grievance.
Carolyn Bracken is Darcy, twin sister of the recently slain Dani (also Bracken). Darcy is a little touched—she still runs the curiosity/antique shop her mother left her and still holds on to the giant wooden man a witch gave her parents for their wedding. Darcy is also blind, so when she arrives at her brother-in-law’s home—the very spot where Dani came to her bloody end—Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his new live-in girlfriend (Caroline Menton) don’t know how to politely ask her to leave. And to take her giant wooden friend with her.
Oddity stitches together a handful of common enough ideas with a few real surprises. More importantly, Mc Carthy hands this tapestry of folklore and soap opera to a nimble cast and a gifted cinematographer. Together this team casts a spell too fun to break.
Mc Carthy’s framing inside and around the house where Dani died is gorgeous, surfaces of buttery caramel colors that shine and echo with the clicks of heels or rattle of ghosts. And when we’re not in this haunted space we’re in the age-old horror stomping grounds of a mental asylum—filmed rigidly and hopelessly, as if to suggest that the science of men is cruel and ugly.
But that beautiful, buttery home—Darcy and the wooden man have claimed that and they have no fear of men and science.
Both Lee and Menton deliver solid performances, while Steve Wall and Tadhg Murphy are flip sides of a terrifying coin. But Bracken owns Oddity—at first the warm and engaging Dani, authentic enough to make you mourn her, and then the elegantly spooky Darcy. Bracken, who was so terrifying and feral in Kate Dolan’s 2022 horror You Are Not My Mother, frightens in a very different way here.
At times Oddity suffers from a throwback sensibility—like an old Tales from the Darkside episode. But there’s no denying Mc Carthy’s talent for creating an atmosphere where anything can happen.
Chris Skotchdopole takes an intriguing premise—groom gets too drunk on his wedding night and can’t quite remember what happened—and layers on something hypnotically, catastrophically banal.
Leah (Ella Rae Peck) and Shane (Rigo Garay) have not started their marriage off on the best foot. Last night was a bust, but maybe a quiet honeymoon at Leah’s boss’s gorgeous, art-bedecked cabin will right things.
Garay and Peck develop a believable antagonism, Skotchdople’s first sleight of hand. Because the performers and the writing (penned by the director along with Garay and Larry Fessenden) slowly deepen and tenderize the relationship so that you buy them as a couple, and hope for their best.
And then.
Most couples contain one person who cannot bear to be rude to someone no matter how obliviously, insistently annoying that person is. The other member of the couple can’t decide who to be angrier with, the annoying stranger or their own placating partner.
John (the magnificently deranged John Speredakos) is that annoying creature, and you have absolutely met this guy before: doesn’t pick up on hints, aggressively friendly, needy and clearly has an agenda.
So it is with much contention that the newlyweds greet John late on their first night together at the cabin. What follows is a bold mix of home invasion horror, comedy of manners, and absurdist timeshare nightmare.
Skotchdopole’s feature debut benefits from his years behind the camera, including shooting Fessenden’s 2019 Frankenstein analogy, Depraved. Crumb Catcher’s disorienting camera emphasizes its chaotic, freakshow quality and visually represents the rising anxiety of the hellish social trap.
Garay delivers an often internal, tender performance nicely offset by Peck’s droll sarcasm. Lorraine Farris turns in strong support work as well, but Speredakos owns this show. His display of desperation and entitlement turned delusional would be hilarious were it not so unsettling.
Skotchdopole’s managed a tightwire of tones, delivering a tense and compelling thriller that turns banality into a weirdly funny nightmare.
You don’t find a lot of outright war/horror genre mashups, but there are a few. Most of them involve murdering Nazis (yay!!). But the shadow of war—its threat, its echoes, its reach toward civilians, its leftover orphans, its cowards and criminals—that influences horror. The Last Circus, Dead Birds, A Serbian Film, 2019’s Guatemalan La Llorona, even The Others – all solid genre films all reeling from the memory of war. But we have other favorites:
5. Ravenous (1999)
The blackest of comedies, the film travels back to the time of the Mexican/American War to throw us in with a cowardly soldier (Guy Pearce) reassigned to a mountainous California outpost where a weary soul wanders into camp with a tale of the unthinkable – his wagon train fell to bad directions, worse weather, and a guide with a taste for human flesh.
Pearce is great as the protagonist struggling against his own demons, trying to achieve some kind of peace with himself and his own shortcomings, but Robert Carlyle steals this movie.
As the wraithlike Colonel Ives, he makes the perfect devil stand-in. Smooth, compelling and wicked, he offsets Pearce’s tortured soul perfectly. The pair heighten the tensions with some almost-sexual tension, which director Antonia Bird capitalizes on brilliantly.
4. Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Tim Robbins plays Vietnam vet Jacob Singer with a weary sweetness that’s almost too tender and vulnerable to bear. In a blistering supporting turn, Elizabeth Pena impresses as the passionate carnal angel Jezebel. The real star here, weirdly enough, is director Adrian Lyne.
Known more for erotic thrillers, here he beautifully articulates a dreamscape that keeps you guessing. The New York of the film crawls with unseemly creatures hiding among us. Filmed as a grimy, colorless nightmare, Jacob’s Ladder creates an atmosphere of paranoia and dread.
3. The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
The Devil’s Backbone unravels a spectral mystery during Spain’s civil war. The son of a fallen comrade finds himself in an isolated orphanage that has its own troubles to deal with, now that the war is coming to a close and the facility’s staff sympathized with the wrong side. That leaves few resources to help him with a bully, a sadistic handyman, or the ghost.
Backbone is a slow burn as interested in atmosphere and character development as it is in the tragedy of a generation of war orphans. This is ripe ground for a haunted tale, and writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s achievement is both contextually beautiful – war, ghost stories, religion and communism being equally incomprehensible to a pack of lonely boys – and elegantly filmed.
2. Under the Shadow (2016)
First-time feature filmmaker, Iranian Babak Anvari, treads familiar ground yet manages to shift focus entirely and create the profound and unsettling Under the Shadow.
The tale is set in Tehran circa 1988, at the height of the Iran/Iraq war and just a few years into the “Cultural Revolution” that enforced fundamentalist ideologies. Shideh (Narges Rashidi) and her young daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) shelter in their apartment as missiles rain on Tehran.
Frazzled, impatient, judged and constrained from all sides, Shideh’s nerve is hit with this threat. And as external and internal anxieties build, she’s no longer sure what she’s seeing, what she’s thinking, or what the hell to do about it. The fact that this menacing presence – a djinn, or wind spirit – takes the shape of a flapping, floating burka is no random choice. Shideh’s failure in this moment will determine her daughter’s entire future.
1. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece is Influenced visually and logically by fairy tales. It takes us to a fairy tale land but is not set on any existing fairy tale, not unlike Argento’s greatest work, Suspiria (1977), and Jee-woon Kim’s brilliant Tale of Two Sisters (2003).
But honestly, there is nothing on earth quite like Pan’s Labyrinth. A mythical cousin to del Toro’s beautiful 2002 ghost story The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth follows a terrified, displaced little girl who may be the reincarnation of Princess Moanna, daughter of the King of the Underworld. She must complete three tasks to rejoin her father in her magical realm.
A heartbreaking fantasy about the costs of war, the film boasts amazing performances. Few people play villains—in any language—as well as Sergi Lopez, and Doug Jones inspires terror and wonder in two different roles. But the real star here is del Toro’s imagination, which has never had such a beautiful outlet.
