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...