THE VOYEURS (2021) is a type of movie I really don’t think I’ve seen before: an erotic thriller that feels very now. It has the familiar ingredients of a ‘90s Skinemax joint: voyeurism (of course), extremely beautiful people with enviable living situations, obsession that brings out sides of people they didn’t know were there and slowly erodes a previously strong relationship, deception, forbidden desire, kinkiness, long sexual tension building to super hot but dangerous sex, death, a ridiculous twist. And yet it doesn’t feel remotely Shannon Tweedy. You almost question whether it’s the same genre, but clearly it is.
There are obvious surface reasons for it to seem different. It’s beautifully shot in a modern digital style (director of photography Elisha Christian, COLUMBUS, THE NIGHT HOUSE), so even all the scenes happening in the dark don’t have that faux-noir feel. And there’s absolutely no sexy saxophone (score by Will Bates, LOLA VERSUS, IMPERIUM) – in fact, it uses lots of upbeat electro dance music, and the main characters have what I consider good taste so they’re often listening to Mulatu Astatke and Galt MacDermot and shit.
Also, though there’s more nudity and sex than most movies these days and they’re trying to make it look amazing, it’s not that type where there’s, like, frilly lingerie and a thousand candles lit. So even the horniness is kinda different. The intimacy coordinator is prominently credited – good job Amanda Blumenthal (Euphoria, The White Lotus, BEING THE RICARDOS). (read the rest of this shit…)
I’m not a religious horror or nunsploitation connoisseur, but right now there’s a brief window of two new nun horror movies playing in theaters, and I’d heard good things about both of them, so I decided to do a double feature. IMMACULOMEN. IMMACULATE was already down to one show a day here, and I had to take the light rail up to Northgate to see it, but the timing worked out just right to get back downtown and see THE FIRST OMEN immediately after. As if by God’s will.
A great thing about action movies as opposed to some of the other genres I get excited about is that they often have a chance to sneak up on me. I had no inkling of a movie called MONKEY MAN coming until the trailer dropped just a couple of months ago. And then all the sudden that morning I knew that the actor Dev Patel (
SIX-STRING SAMURAI is an artifact from another time – the early internet days, when movie nerds like us were a fringe group beginning to ascend to power, and before people would make fake trailers and put them on Youtube. Specifically it was the fall of 1998, after a strange summer of blockbusters everybody hated (
I’m going to continue with my 
GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE is the fifth of the “Monsterverse” movies, and to me the best one. Don’t get me wrong, I kinda liked the attempt at a serious Spielbergian approach in 
The producer I always associate with 
DOWNTIME is a 1997 British film set in a dilapidated apartment building. I feel like somebody might’ve recommended it to me here years ago, but maybe it’s just in my head because the cover says “MOVE OVER BRUCE WILLIS, A BRITISH ACTION MOVIE TO DIE FOR.” I didn’t really think of it as an action movie, but the 
Fairly often I get emails from people who made low budget movies, sometimes they seem to be familiar with me, sometimes they don’t, but they’re trying to do the very hard work of getting people to notice their needle out there in the haystack of what’s available. I sincerely wish every one of them well, but I don’t take very many of them up on it. My fear is that 99.9% of the time it’s not gonna be some hidden gem, or even some crazy failure, it’s just gonna be okay for what it is. And I know I’ll feel bad for them and want to say nice things, but what good does it do them for a niche critic like me to be nice about their movie being okay? I don’t know.
