Bite Me, Tony

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein For a good long while now, I've had the sneaking suspicion that esteemed Mexican film director, Guillermo del Toro may be just a tad bit... .overrated . Of the 10 feature-length films he's made, I've liked about half of them. (For the record, 2017's Oscar-winning The Shape of Water is not one of them.) So there was a 50/50 chance that his adaptation of Mary Shelley's enduring 1818 classic was finally, after a decade of disappointments, going to hit my sweet spot . Let's say that I was cautiously optimistic. And now here we are with del Toro's  Frankenstein  finally debuting on Netflix last week. It is certainly every bit the lavish, atmospheric monster movie that we've come to expect from del Toro, but that doesn't necessarily make it a great movie.  By now, Shelley's tale of Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation has been filmed often enough that most everyone knows the story: arrogant scientist p...

  Misericordia  With nods to Hitchcock and his late French counterpart, Claude Chabrol, Alain Guiraudie continues to chart his own path in the 2024 suspense film, Misericordia . Unleashing mayhem and eroticism in placid settings is a Guiraudie specialty, and with  Misericordia , he delivers a bookend to 2013's much-lauded  Stranger By the Lake ( L'Inconnu du lac ) . Both films have similar themes of death and desire  among a small group of troubled souls in rural France. However, in the case of  Stranger By the Lake , the story unfolds through the eyes of the morally conflicted witness to a murder, while in  Misericordia , the protagonist  is  the morally conflicted murderer. Dispensing with the explicit sexual imagery of  Stranger By the Lake , Guiraudie, instead turns up the heat with what he  doesn't  show: it's a tease that works.  The plot of Misericordia  seems deceptively simple: when a young man named Jeremie...

Not Your Daddy's Spider Woman In the past 40 years it is unlikely that there has ever been a less opportune time to release a big-budget movie like Kiss of the Spider Woman . Let me explain. The plot pairs a sobering (and timely) tale of government-sanctioned police violence, human rights abuses, social upheaval, gender identity and sexual fluidity with the heady glamor of a lavish 1950's musical. At its core, Kiss of the Spider Woman is both a tragic love story and a tale of redemption involving two very dissimilar men who find themselves sharing a cell in a notorious Argentine prison. Given the political evils currently infecting our own country there was sure to be some sort of pushback from the far right. Additionally, there has been an ongoing resistance to films that don't feature superheroes, supernatural serial killers or CGI animation. With that in mind, Kiss of the Spider Woman was probably never destined to be a major blockbuster. But, did anyone really expect i...

  London Fields by Martin Amis It is the last year of the second millennium, and the city of London is gearing up for the grand finale. The rest of the planet is also preparing for this very special occasion: everywhere, the air is full of dread. The totality of the abuse humankind has visited upon the earth has generated a bizarre, never-before-seen environmental phenomenon that seems poised to unleash an extinction-level event. That is, if massive numbers of nuclear warheads aren't launched first. Elsewhere, the president's wife has been stricken with some unnamed malady and lies near death in a medical facility, giving apprehensive Londoners just one more thing to bang their heads about. Concern over the latter seems disproportionate (not to mention absurd) given the dire circumstances facing the world but the first lady's health holds front and center in the tabloid headlines. Which may not be a bad thing. With their attention directed away from the destruction at hand...