Approximately nine minutes into Pig, Nicolas Cage speaks his first lines of dialogue. His character, the bedraggled truffle hunter Robin, has been on screen for the entire film. But he has remained silent as he tramps through the Oregon forest, even refusing to talk when his contact Amir (Alex Wolff), who drove to Robin’s sparse cabin in yellow …
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According to movie nerd lore, John Carpenter’s The Thing flopped in part because Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial premiered two weeks earlier. Spielberg made us love aliens so much that we couldn’t think of them as body-transforming killers, or so the story goes. But that reading misses an important fact about horror movies in the ’80s: a lot of …
After production company logos and title cards describing the state of plague-stricken 1665 England, The Reckoning devotes nearly 10 full minutes to two sequences. One follows the last days of tenant Joseph (Joe Anderson), who contracts the sickness while on a trip to sell his grain in London. Upon learning of his infection, Joseph chooses to hang …
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While making the horror classic Evil Dead 2, Sam Raimi admitted that the various calamities visited upon the main character, Ash, were less about driving the story forward and more about torturing his star, Bruce Campbell. While watching In the Earth, I can’t help but wonder if director Ben Wheatley had the same fun with his star, Joel Fry. Over …
At first, the 1999 film The Straight Story seems like a strange outlier in director David Lynch’s strange oeuvre. Not only is it a G-rated Disney movie, but it’s also the only film he made from a screenplay he did not at least co-write. It is a deeply wholesome film, without even a hint of the malicious dread …