Jake Cole

Atlanta

Writer at Freelance

Writer at Slant Magazine

Like the phoenix from the ashes. Writing at @Slant_Magazine, @hyperallergic, others.

Articles

The Four Musketeers' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

By 1973, Richard Lester, Philadelphia-born but as vital a figure in the cutting edge of ’60s British cinema as Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, had run his film career aground with a string of flops. But he never fully gave up on his plans to adapt The Three Musketeers, a project originally intended as a vehicle for the Beatles.
The Final Reckoning' Review: Adrenaline and Absurdity, Hand in Hand

3 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One too often gets bogged down in plot mechanics in the lead-up to the showdown between Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and renegade assassin Gabriel (Esai Morales) for control over an all-powerful A.I. system called the Entity. Luckily, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, takes advantage of its predecessor’s lugubrious narrative by hitting the ground running.
'How to Get Ahead in Advertising' Blu-ray Review

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

In Bruce Robinson’s debut feature, Withnail and I, the permanent scowl of Richard E. Grant’s character speaks to his anger at a world that fails to acknowledge his genius, his features made more gaunt and lifeless by alcoholism. The actor channels much of the same body language and aura as Withnail in Robinson’s 1987 sophomore feature, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, to play advertising executive Denis Bagley, though here the shambolic sense of grievance is replaced by mercenary superiority.
The Criterion Collection

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Joseph Jon Lanthier |Jake Cole

As part of an essay cycle that roves the cinema of the 1990s for vestiges of intelligent life, Phillip Lopate identifies several attributes that typify the early style of writer turned directors: creatively interpolated exposition, admirably ham-fisted mise-en-scène, and skewedly erudite characters among them.
'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Bill Weber |Bill and Brianne Weber |Jake Cole

Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg retains its direct appeal to the eyes, ears, and tear ducts after more than 60 years, with an emotionalism that’s shameless but never crass. A melodrama about first love set in the French port city of the title, it stood as a bold reinvention of the movie musical in 1964, just as the genre was beginning a nosedive in its Hollywood birthplace.
'A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness' Blu-ray Review: Radiance Films

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

After being blacklisted by Japan’s movie studios in 1967 for—as he himself put it later—making “films that make no sense and make no money,” nonconformist director Suzuki Seijun spent a decade confined to making television and video projects before being allowed to helm another feature. His comeback movie, 1977’s A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, proved every bit as strange and singular as the films that got him shut out of studios in the first place.
A Plodding Neo-Noir with a Killer Finish

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Gareth Evans’s Havoc has a setup as elementally simple as the filmmaker’s 2011 breakout The Raid: Redemption and its 2014 sequel: A grizzled detective, Walker (Tom Hardy), fights his way through a gang war in a city plagued by urban rot, along the way uncovering that the highest echelons of society have ties to the drug-peddling underworld. Along the way, he puts down one gangster after another in violent fashion.
Bullets & Betrayal' Blu-ray Review

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

In the 1980s, Japanese studios began to increasingly make direct-to-video animated and live-action movies as a means of controlling costs and giving filmmakers more freedom. And as the formerly robust economy of the nation crashed at the end of the decade, Toei Studios inaugurated its V-Cinema industry. Shot quickly on video, V-Cinema productions became not merely an additional revenue stream but a lifeline to keep the studio afloat.
‘Sinners’ Review: Ryan Coogler’s Brilliantly Staged, Subtext-Rich Vampire Movie

1 month ago | portside.org | Jake Cole

‘Sinners’ Review: Ryan Coogler’s Brilliantly Staged, Subtext-Rich Vampire Movie Published April 22, 2025 Set in 1930s Mississippi, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners pulls liberally from the folklore surrounding that period’s explosion of blues talent in the Delta area. Musicians of the time, crushed by the weight of Jim Crow and the Great Depression, generally plied their wares in juke joints, and the film centers on one such establishment newly acquired by identical twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B.
'The Eel' Blu-ray Review: Radiance Films

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Jake Cole

Like much of Imamura Shôhei’s work, The Eel deals frankly with matters of sex and sexuality, but with an emotional detachment akin to an anthropological study. That detachment is on display from the start, when businessman Yamashita Takuro (Yakusho Kôji) acts on an anonymous note informing him of his wife’s (Terada Chiho) affair and sneaks home one evening to catch her in the act.