Watching Kyle Edward Ball’s terrifying - and utterly transportive - Skinamarink, I’m reminded of Kitty Horrorshow’s indie darling video game Anatomy and its indelible opening scrawl: “In the psychology of the modern, civilized human being, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the house.” Ball’s experimental nightmare, crafted from a shoestring $15,000 budget, is being touted as “the TikTok generation’s The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity,” but such a jump-the-gun misnomer fails to capture Skinamarink’s unique, debilitating dread.…
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Avatar: The Way of Water 2022
Avatar: The Way of Water is transportive cinema at its finest, a return portal to another world widened by a decade of passion and technology. If you weren’t sold on the first Avatar’s heart-on-its-sleeve sincerity and inherent goofiness, I’m not sure the sequel will convert you, but betting against James Cameron - his humanism, his love for the ocean, his classical discipline - is a fool’s game. At one point, Jake Sully holds his family close: “We are sea people…
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever 2022
Can there be another Black Panther? The half-answer is in Wakanda Forever’s moving metatext, leaning into its own Chadwick Boseman-sized void to highlight the late actor’s inextricability from his most famous role, and to perhaps find a new way forward while honoring what came before. In the end, what is for certain is that after an entire uneven phase of multiverses, Celestials, and screaming goats, it’s Ryan Coogler that once again finds the emotional center for the Marvel universe. At…
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
SXSW 2022 REVIEW
Exploding intimate family drama into a multiverse-jumping, martial arts, sci-fi epic, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a blast of inventive genre fiction. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively and affectionately known as just Daniels, follow up their feature debut of Swiss Army Man with lunatic glee, stretching the limits of visual and kinetic storytelling to its absolute breaking point. Steadied with the incredible - and very game - cast of Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan,…
