Tag: movie reviews

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Here may indeed be torment, but not death.
Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio

Perhaps that’s what hell is. The entire rest of eternity spent in Bruges.
Ray, In Bruges
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Part of every ideologically lonely dissident rightist’s life (or at least mine) is the consumption of horrible to mediocre pop culture minutiae for the purpose of critique, analysis, and simply keeping up with the enemy’s propaganda. (more…)

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The English rock band Queen needs no introduction. Unless you are so averse to rock and pop music that you have completely blocked it from your life, you will have heard the group, and their most famous song, the operatic “Bohemian Rhapsody”. (more…)

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Aging well is one of the best signs of how inspired a movie is—especially for comedies. To make audiences laugh the filmmakers must share certain frames of reference with them—things against which other things can go splat, so to speak. Since frames of reference change over time, making lasting comedies often requires finding the right frames of reference. (more…)

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Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, a film about the quick rise and even quicker fall of the eponymous all-female teenage punk band, is a big guilty pleasure of mine. Indeed, an enjoyer of this movie would have much to feel guilty about. (more…)

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Finally I got around to watching a classic blockbuster from my misspent youth. No, I’m not a Star Wars late adopter. I’ll have you know that I saw that one on the big screen. I don’t care what George Lucas says these days; Han shot first! I was there; I know how it went down in the cantina, dammit! (more…)

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Every movie should be a work of love, but astonishingly few are. A notable exception is Wildcat, the 2023 biopic about Flannery O’Connor, directed by Ethan Hawke from a script that he coauthored with Shelby Gaines. Wildcat is something of a family affair, for it stars Ethan Hawke’s daughter Maya as Flannery O’Connor herself. Maya’s brother Levon Hawke also has a bit part. (Their mother is Uma Thurman. Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman starred together in the stupid anti-eugenics flick Gattaca, which fortunately did not deter them from their own successful eugenic experiments.) (more…)

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The film Joker: Folie à Deux naturally follows the aftermath of its predecessor, the Joker movie of 2019. Then, a mentally disturbed lumpenproletarian repeatedly got kicked when he was down, and quite literally at that. Of course, the cheese decisively slid off of his cracker, and the unemployed clown snapped epically. The new film’s action begins with him in the infamous Arkham Asylum. (more…)

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The tale of one of the most shameful anti-white hoaxes of the last twenty years has finally come to a close. Crystal Mangum, a black woman who is now serving a lengthy prison sentence for the 2011 murder of her boyfriend, finally admitted that she falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of raping her at an off-campus party in 2006. The three students she accused, David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann, underwent an ordeal of persecution by the legal system, their school, and much of the media before all charges against them were ultimately dropped. Since then, the innocence of the three has been common knowledge, but until this month, Mangum had never acknowledged her own dishonesty. (more…)

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London’s Leicester Square has always been the heart of England’s cinema-land. With premiers, red carpets, and the full imported, tariff-free quota of Hollywood razzmatazz, it used to be quite possible to walk across the Square and see De Niro or Kate Winslet swanning around in front of a bank of photographers all trying to get the star to look their way. However, nestled in the historic Square’s environs were a brace of independent cinemas that the discerning cinema-goer felt a bit smug for knowing about. (more…)

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Treat your mind (or trick it) with the following Halloween features at Counter-Currents:

• Jef Costello, “I Wake Up Screaming: My Top Ten Halloween Horror Flick Picks.”
• William de Vere, “All Hallows’ Eve: On Death & Remembrance.” (more…)

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I wanted to like it. Going in I told myself, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Give it a chance.” But nothing could prepare me for this big-buck adulteration.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Road House is similar in name only to Patrick Swayze’s Road House from 1989. It takes some of the latter’s key lines, themes, and characters only to rework them badly and bury them in a bucket of banality. (more…)

You can order Derek Hawthorne’s book Being & The Birds or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heidegger (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) here.

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Derek Hawthorne‘s new book, Being and “The Birds,” was the subject of the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio. Philosopher and film critic Hawthorne draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to illuminate Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic film The Birds, about a series of savage and inexplicable bird attacks on Bodega Bay, a sleepy California fishing village. Hawthorne argues that The Birds depicts a Heideggerian “event” (Ereignis): a sudden and fundamental transformation of the meaning of everything. Modern men believe we are masters of our own destiny. Heidegger calls this “humanism” and rejects it completely. The Birds is an anti-humanist film. In the space of one weekend, all pretensions to the understanding and mastery of nature are shattered, and man is reduced to helplessness in the face of unfathomable mystery. (more…)