Category: matt warren

What happened to the Disaster Movie? For a while—let’s call it “The ‘70s”—the genre was incredibly popular. Nixon was president, marijuana was weak and plentiful, and audiences flocked to dingy movie palaces all across our great nation to watch stars...

Remind me to always be on my best behavior inside a Ben Wheatley movie. The British director’s two previous films—2011’s Kill List and the new Sightseers—both feature unhinged protagonists taking it upon themselves to extract brutal moral vengeance on society’s...

When talking to my girlfriend about why I was so excited for Upstream Color, I explained that director Shane Carruth was sort of like a indie sci-fi Jeff Mangum: a genius auteur who’d burst out of nowhere with a singular...

Director Antonio Campos’s follow-up to his debut indie-hit favorite Afterschool follows Simon (Brady Corbet), an introverted American on extended holiday in Paris trying to get over a bad break-up (and the post-collegiate blues) by —what else? — getting laid, eventually developing a...

True story: following the critical and commercial success of 2009’s Nazi-huntin’ actioner Inglourious Basterds, writer/director Quentin Tarantino retreated to his private underwater castle to begin plotting his next move. Sitting atop a throne made of first-print laserdiscs, he stroked his...

Anyone familiar with Season 3 of HBO’s The Wire will be familiar with “Hamsterdam.” The brainchild of rogue police commander Bunny Colvin, Hamsterdam was an isolated patch of inner-city Baltimore where drugs and vice were tacitly legalized—allowing petty criminals to...

Is there a less appetizing combination of words in the English language than “torture porn”? The disreputable horror subgenre has long earned scorn for its artlessness and gratuitous violence. But Torture Porn’s real crime in 2012 is its datedness. Already...