The primordial soul of ancient mankind is the “truth” which scientist Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) seeks in Ken Russell’s Altered States, a film whose tedium is intermittently broken up by eruptions of psychosexual Russell-ian montage madness. Eddie believes that, by ingesting psychotropic drugs and spending hours in watery isolation chambers, he can tap into his…

Taking its title cue from Aliens in order to position itself as the true first sequel to 1987’s Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, Predators – opening with an image of Adrien Brody’s commando awakening to find himself freefalling through the atmosphere – drops one right into its action, which revolves around a group of disparate killers dumped…

Jared Hess’s fondness for mocking oddballs isn’t absent in Gentlemen Broncos, but there’s a tad more compassion to be found in his latest weirdo odyssey, in which nerdy budding author Benjamin (Michael Angarano) has his loony fantasy/sci-fi novel plagiarized by his idol, down-on-his-luck scribe Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement, he of HBO’s Flight of the Conchords…

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo may have been trash, but at least it had a lucid narrative. The film’s first sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is not so fortunate, offering up an incoherent mishmash of incidents and flashbacks barely connected to any sort of foundational purpose, save for the further exaltation of…

Andrea Arnold’s verité aesthetics can often be pronounced to the point of affectation, but unlike in her thriller Red Road, this approach is reasonably well suited to the kitchen-sink realism of Fish Tank. Arnold’s second directorial feature adheres to a rather archetypal coming-of-age narrative in which angry Essex, England fifteen-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) enters into…

Catherine Breillat’s fondness for female sexuality-themed provocations makes her Bluebeard an ideal marriage of creator and content, allowing the French director – working in the more placid, refined mode of 2007’s superb The Last Mistress – another opportunity to plumb sex-violence-domination dynamics. Breillat’s film is in fact two separate stories, the first concerning the destitute…

Steve Miner is responsible for many a crappy horror film (Friday the 13th Part 2 and III, Halloween H2O), so it’s no surprise that his Day of the Dead is incompetent in every respect, right down to its having nothing to do with the George A. Romero classic whose title it appropriates. In this thoroughly…