The Menu is a refreshing satire that never takes itself seriously. It follows Anya-Taylor Joy’s Margo as she is unknowingly reeled into a world that she doesn’t belong to. Margo meets various personalities at a restaurant on a private island run by the esteemed head chef, Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), who has an agenda for his privileged guests that goes beyond just serving quality food—a plan that goes awry upon Margo’s unexpected arrival.
Michael Myers and Laurie Strode in Halloween Ends (2022)
The final installment in David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy is every bit as disappointing as you would expect from a team bankrupt of any new ideas. Green’s last chapter in an ever-declining saga pits longtime protagonist and bona fide horror icon Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) against a new evil that terrorizes Haddonfield and brings Michael Myers out of hiding for one final, anticlimactic showdown. While Green’s first installment honored Carpenter’s original vision and reinvigorated the franchise, his latest effort strays miles away from everything that made that film enjoyable. While one can recognize the ambitious choices made in this head-scratching sequel it amounts to little more than a mismatch of poorly-executed ideas and a meandering plot, loosely tied together by a screenplay so trite that one can barely believe it was greenlit at all.
You know a movie has got to be bold when the title is just a one word synonym for ghost. Released in 1982, Poltergeist is known as one of the scariest movies ever made due to its top-of-the-line special effects, clown dolls, and creepy little girls. When this movie came out, the American audience was weaning off the Amityville haunted house type of movie, and instead moving towards slasher flicks with Friday the 13th and Halloween. Poltergeist was an example of a subgenre going out with a blast (much like the implosion of the house at the end of the movie). Continue reading Poltergeist at 40: It’s Heeeeeeere!→
Cuties (French: Mignonnes) is not an easy movie to talk about. A heated discourse developed around it since Netflix announced the film’s release on its platform with a marketing campaign that sparked outrage due to the sexually suggestive behavior of the pre-adolescent characters in promotional material. The controversy has continued to grow since the movie’s release on September 9th with rumors being spread about grooming and child pornography. What is fascinating about this phenomenon is that the film’s content clearly sides with its detractors. That being said it is not immune to criticism on how it presents its critique of the sexualization of young girls. Continue reading Still Relevant: A “Cuties” Review→
On April 6, 1993, a seventeen-year-old Zairian immigrant, Makome M’Bowole, was killed while unarmed and handcuffed to a radiator in police custody in Paris, France. What the French police would go on to call an “accident” became another incident in a widespread problem in France at the time, where over three hundred detained and unarmed people had been killed in police custody since the early 80s. Riots were commonplace after these killings in the communities of the victims, which were impoverished and comprised of racial and ethnic minorities as well as immigrants.
