Director Elric Kane said recently that the folks who dole out in the money to make films in the 2020s having been looking for "a dating-app horror film" for a while now. I think Kane nails the directive and seems to get the underlying dread undergirding the experience of, shall we say, "Modern Romance."

It would have no major challenge to ride this premise into a phone-app stalking/slashing rampage with "cool kills," asking little emotional heft or nuance from audience…

Born out of a tossed-off joke pitch ("How about The Mummy's Laboratory? Or Dracula's Wolfen Monster? Or, I don't know, Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde, ha ha?" [money man pauses] "I like the last one. Have your 'Dr. Jekyll turns into a girl' treatment on my desk by Thursday"), this late-cycle Hammer film feels custom-built for a time in a far future in which gender expression and politics and more can be handled with some nuance, at least by some part…

“Johnny Guitar? That’s no kinda name!”
[me, to my TV]: “Says someone called THE DANCIN’ KID.”

This is my third or fourth watch and it’s hard to come up with new things to say about a 5-star movie, other than it’s a 5-star movie. I thought this time about how Nicolas Ray lovingly shoots all of those great night shots of Vienna’s burning down in a riot of angry flame, returning to the scene at least two or three times…

A Franco film so good, so fully Franco and yet so dazzlingly made, it feels like some sort of Rosetta stone to the man’s life’s work. First of all, there’s all that great jazz. “Great jazz” and “Franco film” are often synonymous anyway, but this is really special, a melancholy but kind-handed post-’66 modern jazz with some Latin/Spanish touches. Emma Cohen is so assured and natural in the lead, it feels like when Monk met Johnny Griffin, or Mingus met…