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MOVIE REVIEW
Color Out of Space (2020)
If you’re going to return to making feature films after 27 years away, you might as well pick up where you left off. The opening credits of “Color Out of Space” have Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) carrying out a Wicca ritual, appealing to the angels to take care of her mother, and the words "Directed by Richard Stanley" appear over a close-up of the antique compass in her hand. Back in 1992 Mr. Stanley’s previous feature, "Dust Devil," started with another pilgrim looking at a hand-held totem; but then the figure was a supernatural serial killer and the item was a pocket watch going backwards. And back before that, the credits of “Hardware” ended with a post-apocalyptic scavenger dressed in the very 1990 boho-gothic style of Carl McCoy from the band Fields of the Nephilim (for it was he) holding another battered compass in equal close-up, although the credits on-screen at that exact instant are the freighted names of Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Three films, three nomads, looking at three antique analogue icons for some signal from a cosmos that shows every sign of being otherwise engaged.
Continue reading “Necronomicon Air” »
Patrick Redmond/Universal Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
The Turning (2020)
It’s difficult to imagine “The Turning,” Universal Pictures’s newest throwaway in the January trash heap following the dismally reviewed “Cats” and “Dolittle,” being worse than those two debacles. Indeed, music video auteur Floria Sigismondi’s first film since indie gem “The Runaways” a decade ago could pass as respectable if not for its utterly impenetrable final minutes.
Continue reading “A Loose Screw” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Anonymous (2011)
Reiner Bajo/Columbia Pictures
Roland Emmerich has never been one to let history get in the way of a good story. His 2000 film, “The Patriot,” took untold liberties with the facts of the American Revolution, idolizing Mel Gibson’s Benjamin Martin while utterly damning the actions of the British. It should come as no real surprise, then, that Mr. Emmerich luxuriates in creating a wildly and wholly inaccurate world of Elizabethan-era London for his latest picture, “Anonymous.”
Utilizing a discredited niche conspiracy theory that William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) was a bumbling fraud and a mere front for the refined Earl of Oxford (a brooding and camp Rhys Ifans) as the basis for this alternative history, Mr. Emmerich and scribe John Orloff make the critical mistake of promoting this faction as in any way credible.
Continue reading “The Most Unkindest Cut of All” »