Alistair Ryder

1 week ago | vaguevisages.com | Alistair Ryder

2020s Vague Visages’ Crawdaddyreview contains minor spoilers. Dan Rocque and Kassandra Voss’ 2023 movie features Voss, Juan Riedinger and Nathan Barrett Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays. During the earliest lockdown stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, it wasn’t uncommon for people to suggest that this historical era never needed to be depicted onscreen. Time has proven this take, which I agreed with at the time, to be completely wrong.

3 weeks ago | vaguevisages.com | Alistair Ryder

2020s Vague Visages’ The Fishing Placereview contains minor spoilers. Rob Tregenza’s 2024 movie features Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Andreas Lust and Frode Winther. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays. Is it disrespectful to Holocaust victims to keep mining their trauma for the sake of making an emotional impact in cinema?

3 weeks ago | looper.com | Alistair Ryder

RATING : 7.5 / 10 Tom Hardy is the intense action lead you hoped he would beGareth Evans knows how to stage a bruising fight scene Many of the action scenes feel derivative of other, better moviesThe crime drama is too generic to get invested in If you're going to call a movie "Havoc," I expect nothing less than wall-to-wall carnage, especially if it's arriving courtesy of "The Raid" filmmaker Gareth Evans.

4 weeks ago | thefilmstage.com | Alistair Ryder

The relationship the queer community has with an ever-expanding and rotating lineup of pop divas goes back decades, even if the current iteration of that relationship in the social media age––via the wars between unhinged stan accounts and, of course, endless posts about flop stars doomed to the “Khia asylum”––feels like an entirely new evolution in parasocial fandom.

1 month ago | thefilmstage.com | Alistair Ryder

From increasingly overbearing Eat the Rich satires to a never-ending, post-Get Out wave of social commentary-infused horror, it seems like there’s no end in sight to what the New Yorker recently dubbed cinema’s “plague of literalism.” For genre movies in particular, each satirical target is laid on as thick as the gallons of blood splatter––impossible to misinterpret or get lost beneath the gore, a factor which makes them less interesting to unpack despite the way filmmakers put their...