Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are obsessed with time. In each of the writing/directing duo’s features—2012’s Resolution, 2015’s Spring, and 2018’s The Endless—the ability to travel backwards or forwards in history, or to exist eternally, affords insights into the nature of self, and the knotty emotional and psychological dynamics that govern our lives. Cleverly idiosyncratic, they’re genre filmmakers who use their twisty temporal sci-fi conceits for […]
Nick Schager
34 posts
Arguably the most difficult facet of prosecuting a serial killer case concerns the issue of insanity, since anyone who commits unspeakable atrocities must, in some respect, be out of his or her mind—and thus potentially innocent of premeditation, or able to know right from wrong. That question was essential in the trial of Dennis Nilsen, a Scottish-born resident of London who, in early 1983, was arrested […]
“Cocaine is a hell of a drug,” proclaimed Dave Chappelle’s Rick James, and the same is true of gambling. For proof, just ask Craig Carton, whose world collapsed in 2017 thanks to an addiction to blackjack and the ensuing fraud he perpetrated to pay off his debts. A counselor featured in Wild Card: The Downfall of a Radio Loudmouth equates playing cards for money with snorting […]
Abraham Lincoln was photographed 130 times during the course of his life. But a new Discovery Channel special asks, what if there’s an additional snapshot of the 16th commander-in-chief—on his deathbed? Even setting aside the debatable importance of such a photograph—which wouldn’t prove anything, or provide insights into his final moments—the likelihood that this image could have remained unknown and hidden for 155 years seems very […]
Heir to cinema’s body-horror throne, writer/director Brandon Cronenberg triumphantly follows in dad David’s footsteps with Possessor, a grandly gruesome sci-fi nightmare that traces the blurry line between the psychological and the corporeal, the real and the imagined, and the authentic and the affected. Coming on the heels of his prior 2012 Antiviral, it heralds Cronenberg as a formidable talent in his own right, marking him as […]
Few voices in the metal community are more recognizable—or ferocious—than the one wielded by Corey Taylor, who as frontman for horror-metal juggernaut Slipknot has rightly earned the nickname The Great Big Mouth, and whose work with Stone Sour has allowed him to naturally expand into the hard-rock mainstream. Taylor’s output covers a vast stylistic and emotional range, from rage and misery to heartbreak and longing, and […]
Errol Morris is one of non-fiction cinema’s all-time greats, a godfather of modern true crime thanks to 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, which famously got Randall Dale Adams off of death row. So when he says that another murderer is innocent of the crimes for which he’s been convicted, it’s necessary to listen—if not to instinctively believe him. And yet A Wilderness of Error, FX’s five-part […]
As Sofia Coppola has gotten older, so too have her protagonists, which makes it easy to see them—and their plights—as reflections of the aspirations and anxieties currently preoccupying the auteur. That’s once again true with On the Rocks, the story of a 39-year-old writer struggling with insecurity, suspicions about her husband, and the long shadow cast by her larger-than-life father, here played by Coppola’s Lost in […]
We’re so inundated with evidence of Donald Trump’s fascistic villainy—these days, largely related to the pandemic he’s neglected and mismanaged to the tune of 200,000 dead Americans and counting—that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s also a traitorous puppet who won the 2016 election with Russian assistance. Enter Agents of Chaos, a two-part HBO documentary from the insanely prolific Alex Gibney (debuting Sept. 23) which […]
In the history of love stories, few have been as strange and unlikely as the one depicted in My Octopus Teacher. Netflix’s first original South African feature documentary concerns the wholly unexpected, and ostensibly transformative, affair struck between Craig Foster, a South African filmmaker, and an amphibious mollusk that he discovered in the Atlantic Ocean near the small seaside bungalow he frequented as a kid. It’s […]
We’ll likely never know exactly how Osama bin Laden personally reconciled his many jarring contradictions, but we can be reasonably certain he would have loathed Bin Laden’s Hard Drive, National Geographic’s deep dive into the cache of digital and written materials that were confiscated by the Navy SEAL team that stormed his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, and ended his life on the […]
Robin Williams’ self-inflicted death on Aug. 11, 2014, at the age of 63 shocked the world, not only because few knew that the acclaimed actor had been suffering in any way, but because despite his history of substance-abuse problems, his effusive, uninhibited, hyperactive spirit was so joyous and infectious that it simply didn’t gibe with suicide. With no concrete explanation for why he’d taken his own […]
On a nondescript April night in 1990, 21-year-old Dale Wayne Sigler walked into a Brazoria County, Texas, Subway shop and robbed it of $400. When the man behind the counter, John William Zeltner Jr., attempted to flee into the back room, he was shot six times. The “overkill” nature of the crime implied that the two weren’t mere strangers, and the ensuing revelation that Sigler knew […]
On more than one sunny day during my childhood, my friends and I took a drive down to Vernon, New Jersey’s Action Park, which was advertised incessantly on tri-state area TV as a venue of non-stop good times courtesy of “75 of the wildest, wettest family rides in the world.” While its commercials promised family fun, however, Action Park really delivered a traumatizing sort of excitement, […]
A highly contagious virus spreading rapidly through a crowded indoor space populated by individuals who sometimes put their own interests ahead of those of their fellow man, and a quarantine zone-enforcing government that offers false assurances that everything’s okay and everyone is safe—2016’s Train to Busan is a modern zombie classic that becomes more horrifyingly timely by the minute. Thus, it’s an ideally disquieting moment for […]
The aliens aren’t coming—they may already be here! Or, at least, that’s what recent news suggests the U.S. government suspects. Just this past week, the Pentagon announced it was creating a new task force to look into the existence of UFOs that may have been witnessed flying around and over U.S. military bases. That development was spurred by a New York Times report that, despite previous […]
The only thing more dangerous than monsters in Lovecraft Country are racists—although there are plenty of both in HBO’s new series, and sometimes they’re one and the same. Blending comedy and drama, horror and sci-fi, social commentary and genre thrills, showrunner/writer Misha Green’s adaptation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel tackles American intolerance through the prism of author H.P. Lovecraft, whose famed work about ancient, incomprehensible evils […]
Though I might like to claim otherwise, I’m no expert on big-screen T&A&D. Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies, however, makes a bid for being the definitive documentary on the subject. Driven by a cornucopia of film clip and talking heads—led by actors, directors, historians and critics—it delivers a thorough chronological timeline of cinematic nakedness. Too bad, then, that when it comes to actually […]
In space, no one can hear you scream—and that’s also true of being in a secret Soviet research facility circa 1983, the setting of director Egor Abramenko’s Sputnik. A clever riff on Alien (and its sequel) that generates solid suspense from assured formal touches and a story that only succumbs to heavy-handed gestures at a few key moments, it’s a capable horror show that, like its […]
There are varying degrees of bad guys, and per its title, World’s Most Wanted is about the absolute worst of the worst. A six-part Netflix docuseries whose each installment fixates on a different fugitive, it’s a true-crime effort (premiering Aug. 5) that aims to further raise the profile of the globe’s chief villains—and, in doing so, to make their avoidance of the law that much more […]
“Truth is the most important thing,” says Tomasz (Maciej Musiałowski) midway through The Hater, and of all the falsehoods this habitual liar spews, none is more shameless. Still, while deception is Tomasz’s stock-in-trade, there’s plenty of authenticity to be found in writer/director Jan Komasa’s Netflix feature (premiering July 29), whose release was temporarily delayed because its fictional story wound up echoing a real-life tragedy that shook […]
A portrait of the way in which our lives are shaped not only by our parents and the examples they set—and values they instill—but by the traumatic events we’re forced to endure, Father Soldier Son is a quietly incisive and moving Netflix documentary about a military family beset by hardship. Prepare to cry more than once before its opening credits roll, and then make sure to […]
The Painted Bird is a masterful epic about a young unnamed Jewish Boy (Petr Kotlár) navigating a bleak Eastern European landscape during World War II, and when it had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September, it was equally praised and decried as brutal and harrowing thanks to its horrifying scenes of murder, pedophilia and bestiality. Ask Czech writer/director Václav Marhoul about that […]
Of the many things we’ve (temporarily) lost thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, late nights at the local bar are one of the most dearly missed—unless, of course, you’re a knucklehead in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia or California who continues to visit watering holes without wearing a mask or practicing social distancing, personal and public safety be damned. For those responsible Americans pining for the beloved and […]
There’s horror in old age—the sort no one wants to think about, or look at, or discuss. It’s in that uncomfortable truth that Relic locates its greatest terror and, in doing so, delivers deep, gnawing dread that lingers long after its credits have rolled. The feature debut of Japanese-Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James, who co-wrote the script with Christian White, Relic (premiering at drive-in theaters on […]
Watching Dark’s third and final season is like clutching the hand of a person who’s dangling from a helicopter over a vast canyon—you’re just holding on for dear life, desperate to maintain your grip on the wild situation. Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar’s German-language series has always been a masterpiece of time-travel intricacy, and that continues to be true with its closing eight-episode run (premiering […]
Irresistible concludes with a mid-credits interview between writer/director Jon Stewart and Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and current president of the Campaign Legal Center. In their very brief exchange, Potter lays out the institutional problems that not only allow for campaign-finance malfeasance, but stymie any legislative or legal attempts to reform it. It’s a concise articulation of a fundamental failing of our […]
Though he wears the wooly red cap that Jacques Cousteau transformed into the emblem of deep sea divers, the figure whom famed oceanic photographer Amos Nachoum most closely resembles in Picture of His Life is fictional: Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab. Possessed by an obsession with a creature of the deep that holds, for him, profound symbolic meaning, Nachoum is a man driven to risk life and […]
From one vantage point, the death of Akai Gurley was a familiar story. On Nov. 20, 2014, while walking down a darkened stairwell with a companion in Brooklyn’s Pink Houses projects, the unarmed 28-year-old black man was shot by a New York City Police Department officer. Though ambulances were called to the scene, Gurley didn’t survive. At a present moment in which George Floyd’s murder has […]
There are few actors as accomplished, or as effortlessly cool, as Delroy Lindo, who for more than three decades has brought a commanding intensity, sharp humor and easygoing magnetism to a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. That charisma is once again on grand display in Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee’s Vietnam War film about four vets—played by Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. […]
Michael Stuhlbarg elevates everything he’s in—a fact once again confirmed by Shirley, an excellent new biographical film about The Haunting of Hill House writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) from Madeline’s Madeline director Josephine Decker. As Jackson’s husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, an esteemed critic and professor at Vermont’s Bennington College, Stuhlbarg exudes formidable intellect, sharp wit, daunting imperiousness, and a unique mixture of staunch loyalty and brazen […]
Gin is a loudmouth drunk prone to fits of rage and sorrow. Miyuki is a rebellious teen with a fearsome angry streak. And Hana is a trans woman desperate for love and companionship. Brought together by happenstance and need, they’re a motley homeless trio whose wayward lives in Tokyo are forever altered by a Christmas miracle in Tokyo Godfathers, the late animation great Satoshi Kon’s 2003 […]
Considering the cheesy and unsubtle melodrama peddled by White Lines, it’s amazing that it takes until midway through its fourth episode before someone explains its metaphorical title (hint: it doesn’t just refer to cocaine!). Nonetheless, one doesn’t need to wait that long for wholesale absurdity to rear its head in this latest series from Money Heist mastermind Álex Pina, as the craziness begins early and then […]