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The Deadlights Theater: The Shadow of the Cross
12/4 at 1pm and 7pm: The Baby of Macon12/7 at 7pm: Andrei Rublev12/11 at 1pm and 7pm: Flesh + Blood12/14 at 7pm: Black Death12/18 at 1pm and 7pm: The Last Duel12/21 at 7pm: Valhalla Rising12/25 at 1pm and 7pm: The Devils12/28 at 7pm and 9pm: The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Deadlights Theater: Andrei Rublev
Tonight's presentation of Andrei Rublev begins at 7pm EST!
In the Flesh: Bones and All
Cannibal Bonnie and Clyde on a road trip to find their place in the world is a concept you’ve got to work at losing me on. As luck would have it, that’s just what Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All seems hell-bent on doing. Its few virtues — exquisite makeup and Foley, especially surrounding the acts of cannibalism themselves — can’t conceal its threadbare emptiness and the insufficiency of its stars, particularly Chalamet, who lack the gravitas necessary to sell its often ponderous tone. Mark Rylance does what might charitably be desc...
I Would Like to See It: Paddington 2
It’s strange to call a film as charming and earnest as Paddington 2 refined, but it’s as though someone surgically removed all evidence of ineptitude from its lovely but technically unexceptional predecessor. Even coming in a good ten minutes longer than Paddington, Paul King’s 2018 followup feels much quicker on its feet and more visually coherent. It borrows judiciously from Wes Anderson, but where Anderson’s films can feel cold or sterile, King’s manages to walk the razor-thin line between whimsy and vapidity. His cutaway dollhouse...
The Deadlights Theater: The Baby of Macon
Today's first screening of The Baby of Macon begins at 1pm EST, with an encore to follow at 7pm!
The Deadlights Theater: Ammonite
Today's screening of Ammonite begins at 7pm EST!
In the Flesh: Skinamarink
The top of a doorway. A child’s pajama-clad legs. Legos strewn across gray carpeting. Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink is composed of many such half-images, and for every glimpse we catch of Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and her little brother Kevin (Lucas Paul), ten more flicker on the periphery, sustained as much by the viewer’s racing thoughts as by the camera’s focus. Even the film’s darkness — of which there is a great deal — seethes with uncertainty, rendered almost fractal by impurities in Ball’s choice of film stock. Skinam...
The Deadlights Theater: In the Mood for Love
Today's first showing of In the Mood for Love begins at 1pm EST, with an encore to follow at 7pm!
I Would Like to See It: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
What’s under the lid of the dinner tray? A leg of lamb? Salmon on a bed of rice? Perhaps a dead rat, plated like diner eggs on top of layers of sliced tomato. It’s the not knowing that matters, that generates the psychological tension so instrumental to the form of abuse known as coercive control. By exposing a victim to erratically spaced traumatic events, one conditions them to remain in a reactive, vigilant state, perhaps one of fawning obedience or deference to the abuser. It’s that fundamental tension which animates so much of Whatev...
The Deadlights Theater: Raise the Red Lantern
Today's first showing of Raise the Red Lantern begins at 1pm EST, with an encore presentation at 7pm EST!
In the Flesh: The Banshees of Inisherin
On an island just off the coast of embattled Ireland, in the year 1923, Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) decides to end his friendship with Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell). A blackly tragicomic series of events ensues as Pádraic struggles to accept the loss of his best friend, who wishes to spend his old age pursuing legacy and contribution to the arts through his fiddle-playing and composing rather than passing the time with idle chatter. The tension between legacy and daily life animates much of the film, with the Irish Revolution serv...
The Deadlights Theater: Brief Encounter
Today's showing of Brief Encounter begins at 7pm Est!
WYRM I.III
Chapter III: The Sorrowful MoorWhen Stephen was young, the crew of the trading ship Hellfire delighted in introducing him as My Lord of Nubia, Stephen the Moor. They made for him a little officer’s uniform and bade him sit on the forecastle deck with arms crossed and an expression of great sternness whenever merchants came aboard to barter or to inspect wares. He had presided over dealings with Frenchmen and Spaniards, Portugueses and Laplanders, Teutons and even real Moors, who had their own language and dressed in queer coats and gowns of c...
The Deadlights Theater: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Today's first screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire begins at 1pm EST, with an encore showing at 7pm tonight.
WYRM I.II
Chapter II: FavoritesHere is a mallard: twenty hands at the hipbone, thirty feet in length from its horny beak to the tip of its long, stiff tail. Massive haunches and long, muscled forelimbs, first three fingers fused into a sort of hoof, the thumb of which is a four-inch spike as sharp as a whetted piton. The saddle sits a little forward of the shifting hips, discouraging the beast from lurching up onto its hinders, as even the best-trained of them will sometimes do, and the bridle — naturally much longer than those used for the domestic ho...
WYRM I.I
PART I: NORFOLKThe wolf, escorted by his milk-drawn dam,Unknown to mercy, tears the guiltless lamb;The towering eagle, darting from above,Unfeeling rends the inoffensive dove;The lamb and dove on living nature feed,Crop the young herb, or crush the embryon seed.Nor spares the loud owl in her dusky flight,Smit with sweet notes, the minstrel of the night;Nor spares, enamour'd of his radiant form,The hungry nightingale the glowing worm;Who with bright lamp alarms the midnight hour,Climbs the green stem, and slays the sleeping flower.The Temple...
An Update
Dear patrons, I wanted to let you all know that I Would Like to See It, my series of weekly reviews of movies I've never seen before, is returning soon! I regret not updating sooner; things have been wild for me and my loved ones, and they're just now stabilizing (knock on wood), so next week will mark the column's official return!Thank you all for your patience and understanding <3 No one could ask for better readers.
The Deadlights Theater: Moonstruck
Tonight's showing of Moonstruck begins at 7pm EST!
In the Flesh: Paddington
Is there much in Paddington’s visual language to recommend it? No. Is the script tight or, failing that, exceptional? Again, no. Will it open the notoriously stony hearts of the Western world to the plight of refugees and immigrants? No, art doesn’t really work like that. What Paul King’s 2014 adaptation of the classic children’s book has going for it is a committed cast, an almost agonizingly charming and adorable protagonist, and a sense of zany earnestness out of step with the current wave of sloppily made CGI-fests passing for child...
THE DEADLIGHTS THEATER: SHIVA BABY
Today's first showing of Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby begins at 1pm, with an encore at 7pm tonight.
THE DEADLIGHTS THEATER: HEARTBREAKER
Sunday 11/5, 1pm and 7pm: SHIVA BABY Wednesday 11/8, 7pm: MOONSTRUCK Sunday 11/13, 1pm and 7pm: PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE Wednesday 11/16, 7pm: BRIEF ENCOUNTER Sunday 11/20, 1pm and 7pm: RAISE THE RED LANTERN Wednesday 11/23, 7pm: PHANTOM THREAD Sunday 11/27, 1pm and 7pm: IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE Wednesday 11/30, 7pm: AMMONITE
In the Flesh: Gosford Park
It’s difficult to square the Julian Fellowes who wrote Downton Abbey with the Julian Fellowes who wrote Gosford Park a decade and change earlier. The latter has every last tooth, claw, and brutal instinct lacking from the sloppily sentimental former. Perhaps it’s the involvement of director Robert Altman and producer/actor Bob Balaban that sets Gosford so far afield from Fellowes’ usual rose-tinted view of life in the great English manor houses of the twentieth century. Perhaps Fellowes’ sensibilities have merely stiffened and regressed...
In the Flesh: Cruising
The closer homophobia gets to its subject, the more it’s forced to reckon with the inescapable reality of homosexual existence, the more it becomes a reflection of that existence’s complexities. Joy and struggle, squalor and tedium, love and resentment; all the workaday building blocks which together make up existence as a gay individual in a larger gay community. Director William Friedkin’s infamous Cruising, a film which follows ambitious beat cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) on an undercover assignment in pursuit of a serial killer operatin...
The Deadlights Theater: Halloween Marathon 2022
Today from 12 noon to 12 midnight, join me and the rest of the Deadlights crew for six spine-tingling ghost stories in the theater!12, PULSE2:15, THE EMPTY MAN4:45, LAKE MUNGO6:30, THE DEAD ZONE8:30, GHOSTWATCH10:30, MIDNIGHT SWIM
In the Flesh: Death Line
“Well there’s a stroke of luck,” inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasance) says brightly upon learning that a crew of subway workers has been brutally assaulted and killed. “Murder’s police business.” Like everything else in Gary Sherman’s Death Line, the invisible, immutable borders of class and station are everywhere in the film’s exploration of police interest and indifference. Working class people vanish into files of those declared missing. Vanished members of the upper crust are bones of contention between the blue collar const...
The Deadlights Theater: Noroi
Tonight's showing of Noroi: The Curse begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!
In the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E10: The Black Queen
“We don’t choose our destiny,” Rhaenyra tells her middle child, Lucerys, as he panics at the thought of assuming his grandfather the Sea Snake’s mantle. “It chooses us.” It’s a noble-sounding way of saying that the world doesn’t give a shit what you want from it: what’s going to happen is going to happen. ‘The Black Queen’ is one long walk along the knife’s edge between the thrashing chaos of war and the frustrating compromises and sacrifices of peace as Rhaenyra weighs swearing fealty to her half-brother and usurper in ...
The Deadlights Theater: Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
Today's first showing of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum begins at 1pm EST, with an encore to follow at 7pm EST this evening!
The Deadlights Theater: Incantation
Tonight's showing of Incantation begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!
In the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E09: The Green Council
As Alicent and her father Otto debate whether to usurp the iron throne or else to usurp it and have Rhaenyra and her family killed, I kept thinking of the recurring joke in Arrested Development that George Sr. had committed light treason. His son Michael reminds him there’s no such thing, a smack on the wrist Alicent could use as she balks at the idea of killing her oldest friend. Whatever Otto says, a palace coup is not a game, and orchestrating one without the ruthlessness to see it through is an invitation to bloody, protracted warfare bet...
