By Rex Reed 10/23/12 7:51pm

movies

Tosar in Sleep Tight.

Sleep Tight, Don’t Let The Doorman Bite: This Everyday Joe Will Have You Reaching for the Dead-Bolt

Sleep Tight is a creepy—but highly effective and superbly made—horror movie from Spain in which the monster is spine-tinglingly human. The logo in the ads reads “Someone Is Watching Over You,” and they’re not just whistling Vaya Con Dios. Set in an otherwise upscale apartment building in Barcelona, everything looks inviting. It’s the doorman you want to beware of.

The keeper of the keys—who goes bump in the night, in more ways than one—is César (Luis Tosar). As the super as well as the concierge, he’s privy to the needs, secrets and problems of every tenant in the building—and victim to all their complaints. He feeds their dogs. He changes their locks. He fixes their plumbing. It’s time to get even. Read More

By Jessica Shiraz 8/16/12 4:08pm

movies

Lieberman. (Jessica Shiraz)

Jeff Lieberman Makes Us Squirm at His Tarrytown Office

“Turn around. Don’t move. I want to show you something.” The Observer was standing in horror film writer/director Jeff Lieberman’s office. Relics from film sets poked out of the wooden shelves, smiling photos of A-listers and even Bob Dylan peppered the walls, and one Emmy Award rested precariously on a ledge.

Then, without warning, a worm—the last surviving worm—from the film Squirm was flung at our head.

“Everything’s normal [at home], except my office,” Mr. Lieberman said through a boyish grin. Welcome to Tarrytown: thick with blue mist rolling out from the Hudson River, it’s the historic village that inspired the legend of the Headless Horseman.

It’s no mere coincidence that Mr. Lieberman decided to drop anchor here. Read More

By Rex Reed 4/10/12 7:22pm

movies

Jenkins, Amy Acker and Whitford in The Cabin in the Woods.

The Cabin in the Woods Is a Pixelated Nightmare

On the advice of a friend who described The Cabin in the Woods as the next cinematic “happening” in horror and mayhem, I bit the bullet and suffered through a creepfest so stupid it makes trashy slash-and-burn epics like Humans Versus Zombies and I Spit on Your Grave seem like Molière and Proust. Some films have to seek their own audience like oil seeks its own level in water. Others arrive with a preordained sort of word-of-mouth anticipation that cannot be explained. This is one of them.

A testament to the wonders of writing under the guidance of crystal meth, this nightmare spoof of everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the Scream franchise totally defies logic, and pretty much eludes description. Read More

By Rex Reed 3/28/12 8:45am

movies

Owen.

Intruders’ Stylistic Similarities to Guillermo Del Toro Fail to Fill Hollow Homage

Movies about the profound effects of cold-blooded nightmares on sensitive, impressionable children should not be dull, or arty at the expense of a good hair-raising yarn, but a benign horror flick called Intruders is nothing more (or less) than ludicrous, esoteric hokum. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, a Spanish director so unabashedly infatuated with the films of Guillermo del Toro that he even imitates the shadowy lighting and copies the same jittery camera angles as Pan’s Labyrinth, has done nothing to enhance the genre of thrillers that prey on the vulnerability of children and a great deal to cheapen it.

In Spain, before bedtime, a little boy named Juan makes up a story to entertain his mother, Luisa (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), about Hollow Face, a hideous monster shrouded in a cadaverous hooded cape who rips the faces off children and attaches them to his own blank head so people will love him. Read More

By Rex Reed 12/14/11 9:39am

movies

Mara and Craig.

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is Quite the Swedish Dish

In the blood-soaked hands of the hair-raising, always surprising director David Fincher, the creepy remake of Sweden’s grisly thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is dreary and confusing but technically superb—a darkly photographed and superbly acted film. It is not my cup of bitter tea laced with arsenic, but I admire its tenacity in keeping the viewer dazzled, while the toxic effect of its violence, sometimes unwatchable, left me charged. I hated the 2009 Swedish film version, my dashed attempt to read the book (the first volume in the crime trilogy by the late, overrated Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson) put me to sleep faster than a double-dose of Dalmane, and I still don’t understand why it has been recycled in an estimated $100 million remake as unnecessary as it is unoriginal. It is also impossibly long-winded. When it ended, after just under a whopping three hours, I ended up impressed, in spite of my reservations. If I had found it even half as incomprehensible as it is, I might have liked it twice as much.

Oh, my god, that plot. Read More

By Daniel D'Addario 9/15/11 2:46pm

fall arts preview

Pitt and Hill in "Moneyball" (Photo: 2011 Columbia Tristar Marketing Group)

Top Ten Film

Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
September 23
Scott Rudin, of last year’s movie-of-the-fall The Social Network is back with Moneyball, his latest attempt to prove that while a million dollars may be cool, what’s really cool is a Best Picture Oscar. The pedigree on this one’s impeccable—based on a Michael Lewis book (like The Blind Side!) it intelligently (not like The Blind Side!) looks at the Oakland A’s’ attempt to surmount their lack of money with a smarty-pants statistics system. (What is it about Mr. Rudin and computer geeks? Even his sports movies are about guys who probably listen to too much Radiohead.) Anyway, this movie stars Brad Pitt and a newly slender Jonah Hill, and is the first outing for director Bennett Miller since his Capote made everyone we know buy a copy of In Cold Blood. Read More

By Una LaMarche 8/24/11 9:02am

movies

A clown.

Killer Carneys Battle for Love in the Lush, Grotesque The Last Circus

A word of warning: if you are frightened by clowns, do not—I repeat, do not—see The Last Circus, a madcap, macabre fable from Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia, who has been compared to Guillermo del Toro but who, in this film at least, seems to be channeling some horror fanboy hybrid of Fellini and Almodóvar. Highly stylized and brutally dramatic, The Last Circus, which premiered last year at the Venice Film Festival, can be stunning, captivating and frightening—that is, until it loses its mind halfway through Read More

By Melissa Lafsky 8/24/11 8:58am

movies

Holmes.

Don’t Be Afraid…of Anything But this Terrible Movie

Scary movies can get away with breaking promises to their audience. They can resurrect exhausted clichés (creepy old houses packed with things bumping in the night) and they can even toss in stale character archetypes (the clueless father, the precocious child who sees things adults don’t). But one crime even the best horror can’t get away with is presenting characters so stupid that we lose all interest in whether they live or die. Which is the heart of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. Read More