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# The Take-Up

Thoughtful. Engaging. Creator-Owned.

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## Posts

- [Archive](https://thetake-up.com/archive/)
- [Asteroid City](https://thetake-up.com/asteroid-city/) - Death often shadows Wes Anderson’s characters. His films are populated with widowers, orphans, and adult children who haven’t quite figured out how to move on from a parent’s passing. Consider how the figurative ghost of his late mother’s expectations haunts Max Fischer’s over-achieving exertions in Rushmore (1998). Or the way that the gruesome death of
- [Disclosure Day](https://thetake-up.com/disclosure-day/) - If there’s one thing that Steven Spielberg continues to pursue throughout his career, it is the combination of the truth and the fantastical. Of course, he knows in reality these two modes cannot mesh, except in a medium that blends the fictional and the real. As The Fabelmans illustrated, he has been obsessed with the
- [Killer of Sheep](https://thetake-up.com/killer-of-sheep/) - There’s a moment in writer-director Charles Burnett’s astonishing 1978 debut, Killer of Sheep, that I have never stopped thinking about in the 18 years since I first encountered the film. Stan (Henry G. Sanders), a beleaguered Black slaughterhouse worker living in the Watts neighborhood of South Los Angeles, has just purchased a rusty, broken-down car
- [Backrooms](https://thetake-up.com/backrooms/) - The Backrooms invites interlopers to explore its endless passageways. In the years since an iconic photo of an under-renovation hobby store showed up in a 4chan thread, it has set the minds of internet users aflame. Various theories, stories, videos, games, and memes have been made about the creepypasta, applying additional layers of lore to
- [Beau Is Afraid](https://thetake-up.com/beau-is-afraid/) - Beau is a mess. Portrayed by a paunchy, alarmingly frazzled-looking Joaquin Phoenix with characteristic fearlessness, Beau Wassermann is the apotheosis of a sad-sack, slump-shouldered man-child. He dribbles out his words in a whiny, strangled murmur, punctuating his lines with phantom question marks, as if every sentence were a pleading apology. We first meet Beau in
- [Obsession](https://thetake-up.com/obsession/) - Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston) is in love with Nikki Freeman. He loves her as only a timid dope with a not-so-secret crush can love, unconditionally and irrecoverably. Nikki (Inde Navarrette) is Bear’s childhood friend and currently works with him at a music store alongside goofball bro Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and arty alt-girl Sarah (Megan
- [The Drama](https://thetake-up.com/the-drama/) - It’s a love story for the ages. Two attractive people have a meet-cute at a coffee shop and begin a relationship so loving and comforting that it’s like they were born for each other. They share a romantic moment while sneaking into a museum, move into a nice apartment, and land well-paying jobs that allow
- [The Love That Remains](https://thetake-up.com/the-love-that-remains/) - Hlynur Pálmason, whose Godland (2022) chronicled a fraught Herzogian trek across Iceland’s darkly forbidding landscape, turns from the epic to the intimate with The Love That Remains, which explores the ties that tenaciously bind a family after the breakup of its central couple, Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). If that summary seems to
- [Ready or Not](https://thetake-up.com/ready-or-not/) - Anxious bride-to-be Grace (Samara Weaving) has been looking for a family for most of her life. A former foster child with no peers she can count as close friends, she feels like she’s hit the jackpot with fiancée Alex (Mark O’Brien), who is handsome, attentive, and well attuned to her silly, sardonic vibe. After a
- [What Does That Nature Say to You](https://thetake-up.com/what-does-that-nature-say-to-you/) - The season’s best romantic comedy has finally landed stateside, although it’s been making the rounds on the festival circuit for a year now. Fortunately, it was well worth the wait: Hong Sang-soo’s 33rd feature and his funniest ensemble of the decade so far, What Does That Nature Say to You, takes some of the genre’s
- [The Running Man](https://thetake-up.com/the-running-man/) - Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man is one of the author’s more uncharacteristic works. This dystopian science-fiction tale – set, as it happens, in a capitalist hellhole version of the United States in the year 2025 – concerns a hope-starved man who volunteers for the titular reality competition show. The in-universe “The Running Man”
- [28 Years Later: The Bone Temple](https://thetake-up.com/28-years-later-the-bone-temple/) - Roughly 28 weeks after one of the most bizarre cliffhangers in summer-blockbuster history, a follow-up has finally arrived, albeit through a different lens. Vacating the director’s chair, Danny Boyle hands the franchise’s reins to Nia DaCosta (Candyman, Hedda), who makes the sequel to 28 Years Later her own. The last time this happened, Juan Carlos
- [Suspiria](https://thetake-up.com/suspiria/) - First things first: Director Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is not really a remake of Dario Argento’s inimitable 1977 giallo-turned-fantasia of the same name, at least not in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. Both films are (loosely) horror features, and both are centered on a Berlin-based dance school that serves as a front for a
- [Pictures of Ghosts](https://thetake-up.com/pictures-of-ghosts/) - What makes a place special to us in a deeply personal way? It’s usually something more than the physical space that it occupies, more than the mere experience of its sights, sounds, smells, and textures. It’s a connection, an emotional bond with some essential or treasured aspect of our identities. Yet places are always changing.
- [One Battle After Another](https://thetake-up.com/one-battle-after-another/) - [Note: This review contains spoilers for Vineland and One Battle After Another.] At the conclusion of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, the characters are celebrating the defeat of DEA agent Brock Vond, who has seemingly died as a result of the abrupt defunding of his agency – triggered, apparently, by the government’s de facto societal victory
- [Bugonia](https://thetake-up.com/bugonia/) - Teddy (Jesse Plemons) has a plan. He has done his research. He has procured all the necessary supplies, including padlocks, steel cables, and bulk quantities of antihistamine cream. He has carefully prepared the secluded, small-town home where he currently raises honeybees and lives with his low-functioning, neurodivergent cousin Don (autistic actor Aidan Delbis). The pair
- [My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 - Last Air in Moscow](https://thetake-up.com/my-undesirable-friends-part-1-last-air-in-moscow/) - A group portrait of seven independent Russian journalists, My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow – which screens at Webster University from Oct. 24-26 – saddens, inspires, and enrages in equal measure. Setting out to profile individuals declared “foreign agents” by the government, director Julia Loktev begins recording these indomitable young women –
- [Eddington](https://thetake-up.com/eddington/) - When we first meet sad-sack sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), he’s sitting in his marked SUV out in the middle of the desert, watching a YouTube video about strategies for convincing your spouse to conceive a child. The date is late May 2020 and the place is the middle-of-nowhere, dead-horse town of Eddington, N.M. Tribal
- [A Big Bold Beautiful Journey](https://thetake-up.com/a-big-bold-beautiful-journey/) - From a distance, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey resembles any other Hollywood romance, one featuring bankable, charming stars and a light enough tone to appeal to everyone. The story behind this fluffy romantic drama, however, reveals one of the most bizarre movies in years. Starting out as a 2020 Blacklist favorite, Seth Reiss’ screenplay was
- [Highest 2 Lowest](https://thetake-up.com/highest-2-lowest/) - Back in 2008, DreamWorks and Universal were intent on remaking a South Korean thriller that is widely regarded as one of the best films ever made. The American version of Oldboy started out as a Steven Spielberg film starring Will Smith, but that iteration vanished in a haze of legal troubles within a year. The
- [Him](https://thetake-up.com/him/) - Cameron Cade (Austin Pulliam) was raised to revere the American Holy Trinity: God, family, and football. In young Cam’s personal theology, the only figure that loomed larger than his high-expectations, masculinity-obsessed father (Don Benjamin) was legendary San Antonio quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Cam watched in awestruck revulsion as his idol suffered a gruesome leg
- [By the Stream](https://thetake-up.com/by-the-stream/) - Jeonim (Kim Min-hee) is in a predicament. An art instructor at a Seoul university, she’s been put in charge of her department’s contribution to the school’s annual sketch festival. It was going so well: Her group had a director (Ha Seong-guk), a script, and a full cast in place. However, after a scandal rocked the
- [Rutted Gravel Roads Through Hell: The Singular Cinema of Blake Eckard](https://thetake-up.com/rutted-gravel-roads-through-hell-the-singular-cinema-of-blake-eckard/) - [This retrospective essay on the features of independent Missouri filmmaker Blake Eckard was originally written in 2018. Additional minor edits have been made for clarity and style. The essay contains spoilers and is included as liner notes in Synapse Films’ new double-feature DVD of two of Eckard’s films, Bubba Moon Face (2011) and Coyotes Kill
- [Catching Bullets](https://thetake-up.com/catching-bullets/) - For those of us fortunate enough to live in the cossetted security of suburbs or middle-class city neighborhoods, the epidemic of gun violence that plagues impoverished urban areas in the United States – especially those inhabited largely by Black residents – only occasionally affects our daily lives. Yes, crime sometimes intrudes on our relatively safe
- [Weapons](https://thetake-up.com/weapons/) - When it comes to horror cinema, a compelling visual hook can be an efficient and effective means to lure an audience into a story. Horror, after all, is arguably the most psychologically primordial of genres, and a capable filmmaker can bait the trap with little more than a striking, viscerally wrong image. Think of the
- [Nope](https://thetake-up.com/nope/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] History is littered with firsts that aren’t actually firsts. Whenever a self-appointed expert blithely asserts that “so-and-so was the first person to do such-and-such,” it’s probably a safe bet that there was, in fact, someone who pulled off the feat in question even earlier. (Odds are also
- [28 Years Later](https://thetake-up.com/28-years-later/) - “You were thinking that you’ll never hear another piece of original music ever again. You’ll never read another book that hasn’t already been written … or see a film that hasn’t already been shot.” This line from Selena (Naomi Harris) in 28 Days Later (2002) best captures the abstract terror that the film’s premise brings
- [Afternoons of Solitude](https://thetake-up.com/afternoons-of-solitude/) - “Break a leg” is a common expression in show business. But how often is it a very real possibility? For Andrés Roca Rey, subject-slash-star of Albert Serra’s ironically titled documentary Afternoons of Solitude, snapping a bone is one of many potential hazards during a performance. Rey is a matador participating in the sport of bullfighting,
- [Midsommar](https://thetake-up.com/midsommar/) - Bad relationships can be fiendishly hardy things. They hobble along well past their expiration date, animated by pernicious habit and sustained on guilt, anxiety, and cowardice. Everyone involved might know on some level that the relationship is dead, but they still insist on propping it up in the corner and wedging a drink into its
- [Hereditary](https://thetake-up.com/hereditary/) - Every cinematic experience is inherently subjective, but the horror genre presents a particularly vivid illustration of just how personal responses to films can be. Fear is a primeval emotion – perhaps the primeval emotion – and as such it’s tremendously challenging to parse exactly why a feature might elicit shrieks of terror from one viewer
- [Materialists](https://thetake-up.com/materialists/) - Celine Song’s Materialists starts off as any other rom-com would, with a 2001-esque prologue featuring cavemen. When a prehistoric couple express a timeless romantic gesture – a proposal sealed via a flower fashioned into a ring – the film then cuts to the title card. It’s the film’s first joke, as any sincerity in the
- [The Phoenician Scheme](https://thetake-up.com/the-phoenician-scheme/) - Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme opens with the attempted assassination of international financier and industrialist Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (a delightfully dry Benecio del Toro). The year is 1950, and this is the sixth such attempt on the aircraft and munitions magnate’s notoriously durable life, for the record. Initially, it’s unclear what grievances Korda’s would-be killers
- [Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning](https://thetake-up.com/mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning/) - “I’m asking you to trust me, one last time.” In the latest and perhaps final Mission: Impossible feature, veteran super-spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) makes this earnest plea to CIA-director-turned-President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) as the world trembles on the brink of an AI-engineered nuclear apocalypse. Sloane has some reason for skepticism – Ethan and
- [Hit the Road](https://thetake-up.com/hit-the-road/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Like many great road movies, Panah Panahi’s quirky, bittersweet directorial debut, Hit the Road, is a story about people who are stuck. This is true in the literal sense: The characters comprise an unnamed family of four who are traversing the backroads of northwestern Iran’s scenic Armenian ridgelands
- [Bring Her Back](https://thetake-up.com/bring-her-back/) - As an example of contemporary horror’s current state, Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back initially comes off as more of the same. Given the straightforward title and the broad idea of a character reacting and rebelling against the inevitability of death, the directors’ latest not only recalls their highly successful feature debut, Talk To
- [More Ghosts Than People: Red Dead Redemption 2 and the Art of the Prequel](https://thetake-up.com/more-ghosts-than-people-red-dead-redemption-2-and-the-art-of-the-prequel/) - [Note: This article was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens. It contains major spoilers for Red Dead Redemption and minor spoilers for Red Dead Redemption 2.] When gaming enthusiasts learned in November 2017 that Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 would be a direct prequel to the company’s award-winning 2010 Western action-adventure game,
- [Kill the Flame: The Burden of Grief in Assassin's Creed Origins](https://thetake-up.com/kill-the-flame-the-burden-of-grief-in-assassins-creed-origins/) - [Note: This article was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens. It contains major spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Origins.]When Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Origins landed on gaming consoles in October 2017, it marked a crucial turning point for the stealth-action franchise. The series’ last three entries had been met with a mixed response from fans
- [Love Among the Ruins: Romance in Cyberpunk 2077](https://thetake-up.com/love-among-the-ruins-romance-in-cyberpunk-2077/) - [Note: This article was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens. It contains moderate spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077.]“Romanceable” non-player characters (NPCs) have long been a popular and meme-tempting feature of modern, big-budget role-playing games (RPGs). To the dedicated role player, romance is an integral part of the play experience in a work of epic
- [Why Deathloop Is the Game of the Year](https://thetake-up.com/why-deathloop-is-the-game-of-the-year/) - [Note: This article was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] One of the common criticisms that is often leveled against contemporary AAA video games is that they’re overstuffed with… stuff. One might term this the Ubisoft Problem, although the condition afflicts titles released by many prestige game studios. It is not enough that
- [<em>Assassin’s Creed Shadows</em> Thrives in the Space Between Thought and Action](https://thetake-up.com/assassins-creed-shadows-thrives-in-the-space-between-thought-and-action/) - “You cannot know anything,” a wise assassin once cautioned, “only suspect. You must expect to be wrong, to have overlooked something.” Ubisoft seems to have kept this quote in mind when developing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the latest installment in the studio’s long-running action-stealth game franchise. Such a Socratic sentiment may not be immediately obvious to
- [These American Lives: The United States of Frederick Wiseman](https://thetake-up.com/these-american-lives-the-united-states-of-frederick-wiseman-4/) - From Feb. 6 – May 29, the Webster University Film Serieswill feature a marathon retrospective on the works of legendaryAmerican documentarian Frederick Wiseman. The Take-Up is co-sponsoringthis series, which editors Kayla McCulloch and Joshua Ray also assistedin programming. This piece is one of several essaysfrom Kayla looking back at some the individual films featured in
- [Drop](https://thetake-up.com/drop/) - A pleasantly preposterous dollop of pulpy thrills, Drop is the sort of artistically trifling but calorically dense two-bite snack that seems designed for a quick, low-effort date night. Although premised on a relatable modern aggravation – strangers “cyberflashing” messages, photos, and other unsolicited rubbish to one’s smartphone via services like AirDrop and Quick Share –
- [These American Lives: The United States of Frederick Wiseman](https://thetake-up.com/these-american-lives-the-united-states-of-frederick-wiseman-3/) - From Feb. 6 – May 29, the Webster University Film Series will feature a marathon retrospective on the works of legendary American documentarian Frederick Wiseman. The Take-Up is co-sponsoring this series, which editors Kayla McCulloch and Joshua Ray also assisted in programming. This piece is one of several essays from Kayla looking back at some
- [<em>The Roottrees Are Dead</em> Is a Marvelous Mystery About the Obscurity of Information](https://thetake-up.com/the-roottrees-are-dead-is-a-marvelous-mystery-about-the-obscurity-of-information/) - In recent years, much has been made of social media’s role in disseminating urban legends, malicious hoaxes, and outright political disinformation. No one seems to be immune, whether it’s your racist great-uncle ranting about abortion-powered Mexican fentanyl factories or an impressionable Gen Alpha parroting the anti-vaxxer word salad that has inexplicably wriggled its way into
- [Lisey's Story](https://thetake-up.com/liseys-story/) - At first blush, author Stephen King and filmmaker Pablo Larraín seem like an unusual pairing, as creative collaborations go. King, of course, is the reigning champion of contemporary American horror fiction – in prolificacy and sales, if not in literary cachet – who is currently enjoying a renewed surge in big- and small-screen adaptations of
- [The Outsider](https://thetake-up.com/the-outsider/) - A genuinely great Stephen King adaptation is a tricky thing to pull off. A would-be adapter is generally obliged to preserve the elements that have made King the long-reigning master of American pop horror: colorful but authentic characters, heightened yet relatable situations, and a facility for distilling universal anxieties into vivid, pulp-gothic premises. Faithful translation
- [The Lighthouse](https://thetake-up.com/the-lighthouse/) - [Note: This review was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] In his 2015 masterpiece, The Witch, director Robert Eggers brought the American horror story full circle, shedding two decades’ worth of genre-savvy self-awareness in one cackling scream. Eggers achieved this by returning to the source, as it were, to the Puritan roots of
- [African Film Fest 2025: Demba, Sadrack, The Village Next to Paradise](https://thetake-up.com/african-film-fest-2025-demba-sadrack-the-village-next-to-paradise/) - Washington University’s African Film Festival returns for its 19th edition from March 28 – 30. This year, the fest’s three narrative features — Demba, Sadrack, and The Village Next to Paradise — serve as a moving triptych about family (of all kinds) and the strength that one can derive from these ties during times of
- [Black Bag](https://thetake-up.com/black-bag/) - Steven Soderbergh hit the ground running in 1989 with his Palme d’Or-winning feature debut, sex, lies, and videotape, and has spent the ensuing decades building a broad, fascinating filmography that refuses straightforward placement along the populist-to-avant-garde spectrum. Even so, the past five years have been a particularly prolific period for Soderbergh, who has helmed 10
- [A Real Pain](https://thetake-up.com/a-real-pain/) - A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature as a writer-director, is a sweet-and-sour little road movie about the snarl of complicated feelings that fall under the umbrella of “family.” This encompasses not only the flesh-and-blood relations who exasperate us despite (or because of) our love for them, but also the larger, looming shadow of ancestral
- [These American Lives: The United States of Frederick Wiseman](https://thetake-up.com/these-american-lives-the-united-states-of-frederick-wiseman-2/) - From Feb. 6 – May 29, the Webster University Film Series will feature a marathon retrospective on the works of legendary American documentarian Frederick Wiseman. The Take-Up is co-sponsoring this series, which editors Kayla McCulloch and Joshua Ray also assisted in programming. This piece is one of several essays from Kayla looking back at some
- [The Monkey](https://thetake-up.com/the-monkey/) - Employing a dramatic, even jarring shift in tone from one narrative feature to the next is practically a horror filmmaking tradition, indulged by luminaries such as George Romero (Season of the Witch to The Crazies), John Carpenter (Christine to Starman), and Tobe Hooper (Lifeforce to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2). Writer-director Osgood Perkins is in
- [Unmuffled Screams and Broken Hearts - Twin Peaks: The Return, Episode 8](https://thetake-up.com/unmuffled-screams-and-broken-hearts-twin-peaks-the-return-episode-8/) - Editor’s Note: It’s difficult to overstate the importance of David Keith Lynch and his works to the founders of The Take-Up. (There’s a reason that we emerged from behind the blue curtains of Club Silencio to introduce ourselves.) Accordingly, the news of his death on Jan. 15 was both gutting in the moment and profoundly
- [Armand](https://thetake-up.com/armand/) - Although the name Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel might not sound familiar, his grandparents’ will surely ring a bell: Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman. Forget about the nepo-baby debate. The conversation has now evolved to nepo grandbabies. Establishing Tøndel as the Norwegian equivalent of a Drew Barrymore, Billie Lourde, or Dakota Johnson wouldn’t be necessary if not
- [No Longer Your Film: The Shadow Hollywood of Mulholland Drive](https://thetake-up.com/no-longer-your-film-the-shadow-hollywood-of-mulholland-drive/) - Editor’s Note: It’s difficult to overstate the importance of David Keith Lynch and his works to the founders of The Take-Up. (There’s a reason that we emerged from behind the blue curtains of Club Silencio to introduce ourselves.) Accordingly, the news of his death on Jan. 15 was both gutting in the moment and profoundly
- [Theater of Thought](https://thetake-up.com/theater-of-thought/) - “What’s on your mind?” It’s a simple enough question. Facebook users have seen it at the top of their feeds for more than 15 years now. Considerate friends or caring family might use it as a launch pad for a deeper conversation that goes past the standard surface-level response, “Nothing much. What about you?” However,
- [The Best Films of 2024](https://thetake-up.com/the-best-films-of-2024/) - Chin-stroking pieces on the role of art in politically perilous times have long been a perennial feature of American cultural criticism, but particularly so in the past decade. Now that the nation is looking down the barrel of (at least) another four years of kleptocratic authoritarianism under the rubbery mask of cultural revanchism, there is
- [Lost Highway](https://thetake-up.com/lost-highway/) - Editor’s Note: It’s difficult to overstate the importance of David Keith Lynch and his works to the founders of The Take-Up. (There’s a reason that we emerged from behind the blue curtains of Club Silencio to introduce ourselves.) Accordingly, the news of his death on Jan. 15 was both gutting in the moment and profoundly
- [These American Lives: The United States of Frederick Wiseman](https://thetake-up.com/these-american-lives-the-united-states-of-frederick-wiseman/) - From Feb. 6 – May 29, the Webster University Film Series will feature a marathon retrospective on the works of legendary American documentarian Frederick Wiseman. The Take-Up is co-sponsoring this series, which editors Kayla McCulloch and Joshua Ray also assisted in programming. This piece is the first of several essays from Kayla looking back at
- [David Lynch: Appalled Fascination](https://thetake-up.com/david-lynch/) - Editor’s Note: It’s difficult to overstate the importance of David Keith Lynch and his works to the founders of The Take-Up. (There’s a reason that we emerged from behind the blue curtains of Club Silencio to introduce ourselves.) Accordingly, the news of his death on Jan. 15 was both gutting in the moment and profoundly
- [Wolf Man](https://thetake-up.com/wolf-man/) - Shrewdly reimagining H.G. Wells’ 1897 “Grotesque Romance” for a contemporary audience, writer-director Leigh Whannell’s 2020 take on The Invisible Man seemed to break the curse that had afflicted Universal Pictures’ flop-sweaty efforts to alchemize box-office gold from its roster of classic movie monsters. (Remember The Mummy? No, the other one. No, the Tom Cruise one.)
- [The Invisible Man](https://thetake-up.com/the-invisible-man/) - It’s not often remembered by contemporary genre fans, but H.G. Wells’ 1897 science-fiction novel The Invisible Man has quite the evocative subtitle: A Grotesque Romance. Wells was employing that word, “romance,” in the traditional literary sense, meaning a tale of adventure and mystery. In writer-director Leigh Whannell’s disturbing new film adaptation, however, the term carries
- [Better Man](https://thetake-up.com/better-man/) - Following a year with three major music biopics – Back to Black, Bob Marley: One Love, and A Complete Unknown – it’s challenging to sell another such feature to filmgoers. Besides the intrigue of watching a popular musician’s life story and listening to their biggest songs in a theater, the form rarely offers anything that
- [Golden Anniversaries: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls](https://thetake-up.com/beyond-the-valley-of-the-dolls/) - [Note: This essay was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, May, Nichols, Ashby, Friedkin, Mazursky, De Palma, and even Speilberg and Lucas: These are the names most commonly associated with New Hollywood. The movement – as it can be seen now – was born when the long-established American studios
- [Golden Anniversaries: The Traveling Executioner](https://thetake-up.com/golden-anniversaries-the-traveling-executioner/) - [Note: This essay was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Although The Traveling Executioner is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the events depicted in the film take place long before 1970 — about 50 years, to be exact. The film positions itself within the American South toward the tail end of World
- [Golden Anniversaries: A New Leaf](https://thetake-up.com/golden-anniversaries-a-new-leaf/) - [Note: This essay was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Poor, poor Henry Graham (Walter Matthau). As evidenced by the Ferrari he uses to commute around New York City, the newfound bankruptcy he treats as a terminal diagnosis, or the wealthy bride he speaks of like a promising job opportunity, he just doesn’t
- [Golden Anniversaries: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice](https://thetake-up.com/golden-anniversaries-bob-carol-ted-alice/) - [Note: This essay was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Just how did Paul Mazursky’s sexually liberated comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice – which Pauline Kael curiously praised as “a slick, whorey movie” after its premiere at the 1969 New York Film Festival – find itself as the sixth-highest-grossing film
- [Golden Anniversaries: Wake in Fright](https://thetake-up.com/golden-anniversaries-wake-in-fright/) - [Note: This essay was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] There is a sneaky perversity at the heart of Ted Kotcheff’s masterful 1971 feature Wake in Fright, one quite apart from the film’s harrowing depiction of illegal gambling, drunken hooliganism, and kangaroo slaughter in the Australian Outback. Most stories about a journey into
- [Golden Anniversaries: Midnight Cowboy](https://thetake-up.com/golden-anniversaries-midnight-cowboy/) - [Note: This essay was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] In the spring of 1969, the popular conception of New York City among the American movie-going public – or, perhaps more accurately, the white, middle-class American movie-going public – was informed to a substantial degree by a fading Technicolor illusion. The New York
- [Hard Truths](https://thetake-up.com/hard-truths/) - British filmmaker Mike Leigh has an unassailable talent for rendering characters who are a lot, as they say. Pansy, the vitriolic protagonist of Leigh’s latest feature, Hard Truths, might be the most “a lot” person in the entire Leigh-verse. That’s saying something, considering that same cinematic world contains Johnny, the nihilistic, misogynistic thief whose aimless
- [A Complete Unknown](https://thetake-up.com/a-complete-unknown/) - “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” A weary Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) makes that barbed, amusingly profane observation to her sometime lover and singing partner Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) about two-thirds through A Complete Unknown, and by this point in the film, even his most forgivingly worshipful fans will no doubt agree. Characteristically, the unruffled
- [Nosferatu](https://thetake-up.com/nosferatu/) - Emerging from the nocturnal gloom of winter like a specter of Death itself, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is one of the most lavishly, relentlessly Gothic horror features that 21st-century cinema has birthed to date. Was there ever any doubt? The moment that the director’s surprisingly faithful remake of F.W. Murnau’s genre-defining Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror
- [The Best Films of the 2010s](https://thetake-up.com/the-best-films-of-the-2010s/) - [Note: This feature was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Reflecting on and ranking the cinematic highlights of the past decade to craft a “definitive” list of the Best Films of the 2010s is a daunting task. Accordingly, the Lens reached out to numerous St. Louis-based film critics, journalists, scholars, professionals, and other
- [A Traveler's Needs](https://thetake-up.com/a-travelers-needs/) - Hong Sang-soo and Isabelle Huppert were supposed to meet for dinner. So begins the story behind A Traveler’s Needs, Hong’s 31st film and third with Huppert after In Another County (2012) and Claire’s Camera (2017) — the latter serving as this critic’s very first introduction to the Sang-soo-niverse some seven years ago. “Everything you do
- [Maria](https://thetake-up.com/maria/) - First things first: Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) is dead. The scene taking place in the adjourning room is a slow-moving and silent one – medics prep a stretcher for her body, butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) watches over, with maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) trudging aimlessly through a lavish Paris apartment, now bereft of its mistress. The
- [Nocturnes](https://thetake-up.com/nocturnes/) - Nocturnes is a rare and exquisite species of documentary, a meditative ode to the slow, thankless rhythms of scientific fieldwork – and to the untrammeled wonder that rustles beneath the seemingly dry human compulsion to count, measure, and record. For 82 minutes, filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan follow along with rapt focus as entomologist
- [No Man's Sky Persuaded Me to Write My Own Story](https://thetake-up.com/no-mans-sky-persuaded-me-to-write-my-own-story/) - It took me about three months to realize that I love No Man’s Sky. During this period, I fiddled on-and-off with Hello Games’ mind-bogglingly enormous science-fiction survival sandbox. Although space-based adventure isn’t normally my cup of tea, genre-wise, my interest was piqued by the game’s staggering technical concept and luscious visual presentation. Harkening back to
- [Nutcrackers](https://thetake-up.com/nutcrackers/) - We get the gist of Michael Maxwell (Ben Stiller) before the opening credits of Nutcrackers are even halfway over: This work-obsessed, sports-car-driving, sharply dressed man yapping about business to a colleague over the phone does not fit in with his rural Ohio surroundings. He’s on his way to his recently departed sister’s house – she
- [Dahomey](https://thetake-up.com/dahomey/) - Mati Diop’s second feature, Dahomey, begins where your stereotypical globe-spanning adventure film ends: an edifice of boxed-up artifacts from a non-extant kingdom, carefully stacked in a temperature-controlled storage room beneath a nondescript museum, catalogued and inventoried for posterity’s sake. These relics are kept in the dark thousands of miles from home, effectively jailed by some
- [Blitz](https://thetake-up.com/blitz/) - A spiritual companion of sorts to Steve McQueen’s massive World War II documentary Occupied City (2023), Blitz continues the filmmaker’s journey through lesser-known stories from the global conflict. Here, he concentrates on a mother and son living in London during the Germans’ eight-month bombing campaign against the city between fall 1940 and spring 1941. George
- [Wicked](https://thetake-up.com/wicked/) - A large part of what makes The Wizard of Oz so fascinating is the darkness hidden beneath the story’s wondrous, child-friendly exterior. L. Frank Baum’s original novel is a fairy tale involving magical creatures and whimsical locations, but it also has a man of power ordering a little girl to murder his enemy in exchange
- [The Beautiful Disarray of Wildermyth](https://thetake-up.com/the-beautiful-disarray-of-wildermyth/) - [Note: This article was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Worldwalker Games’ tactical storytelling game Wildermyth is the kind of charming and addictive genre hybrid that often makes a splash in the indie gaming world. It rather inventively picks andchooses elements from several different game genres, which can make it a bit bewildering to
- [Anora](https://thetake-up.com/anora/) - This story begins one night in a classy-ish Manhattan strip club, where Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison) works as a dancer and occasional escort. Ani is a striver and a hustler: She might be only 23 years old, but she knows how to work a room. She glides up to customers, flashes her smile, and
- [I Saw the TV Glow](https://thetake-up.com/i-saw-the-tv-glow/) - It’s been three years since Jane Schoenbrun punched a reality-warping hole in the indie cinema scene with their skin-crawling fable of online paranoia and dissociation, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. As microbudget directorial breakouts go, that film was a critical smash, solidifying Schoenbrun’s reputation as one of America’s most vital rising filmmakers. Yet
- [The Florida Project](https://thetake-up.com/the-florida-project/) - [Note: This review was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1976 single “American Girl” references the heartache and recklessness of young adulthood, but the song could easily describe the life of Moonee, the precocious 6-year-old heroine of The Florida Project. Petty might have been singing about unrequited love,
- [Heretic](https://thetake-up.com/heretic/) - Notwithstanding its provocative yet ambiguous title, Heretic is not really a religious horror film. To be sure, the movie features copious dialogue about the tension between belief and disbelief, but writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are less interested in matters of the spirit than in watching their poor protagonists squirm like hooked worms. In
- [Every John Carpenter Film, Ranked](https://thetake-up.com/every-john-carpenter-film-ranked/) - [Note: An earlier version of this article was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] In a 1999 Film Comment piece celebrating John Carpenter, the director memorably quipped to Kent Jones: “In France, I’m an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain; a genre film director; and, in the U.S.A., a bum.” After 20
- [Chicago Film Fest 2024: Separated / The Other Way Around](https://thetake-up.com/chicago-film-fest-2024-separated-the-other-way-around/) - The 60th Chicago International Film Festival comes to a close this Sunday. Before then, there’s a full weekend of programming that remains — including new films from Spanish filmmaker Jonás Trueba and prestigious documentarian Errol Morris. “What will you compromise for ambition?” asks Errol Morris’s latest documentary, Separated, an exposé as blunt and to the
- [Chicago Film Fest 2024: Cloud / Eephus](https://thetake-up.com/chicago-film-fest-2024-cloud-eephus/) - This year’s Chicago International Film Festival runs Oct. 16-27. Currently in its 60th year, the longest-running competitive film fest on the continent boasts a lineup worthy of its accomplished history: new works from Steve McQueen, Hong Sang-soo, Robert Zemeckis, Pedro Almodóvar, Mike Leigh, Andrea Arnold, Jia Zhangke, Mati Diop, Joshua Oppenheimer, and (whew) many, many
- [The Red Suitcase](https://thetake-up.com/the-red-suitcase/) - Throughout the modern history of the horror movie, one of the most unsettling tropes is that of the silent, slow-moving stalker. Whether you credit it to Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its lumbering zombies or Halloween (1978) and the unhurried gait of the franchise’s iconic killer, it’s something that has seeped into countless
- [Smile 2](https://thetake-up.com/smile-2/) - Writer-director Parker Finn’s Smile 2 – the follow-up to his surprise 2022 horror hit – picks up less than a week after its predecessor’s bleak and ghoulish conclusion. Frazzled ex-cop Joel (scream king Kyle Gallner) sits in his car on a wintery suburban street, working up the nerve to attempt a hail-Mary gambit. Not to
- [The First Omen](https://thetake-up.com/the-first-omen/) - The horror genre doesn’t exactly have an encouraging track record lately when it comes to prequels, reboots, requels, and all the other cinematic flotsam that one might lump together under that dreadful catch-all “intellectual-property exploitation.” The past few years have given us a couple of forgettable Scream legacy sequels (2022, 2023) and a big-swing Halloween
- [A Different Man](https://thetake-up.com/a-different-man/) - Writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is a smart, morbid, and unexpectedly funny film, but it plays a bit of a long game, only gradually revealing all the cards up its sleeve. It begins with a slump-shouldered shell of a man named Edward (Sebastian Stan), who is afflicted with severe facial deformities due to a
- [The Substance](https://thetake-up.com/the-substance/) - A feature-length Tales from the Crypt episode that mashes up The Picture of Dorian Gray, All About Eve (1950), and Death Becomes Her (1992) into an orgiastic body-horror fable, Coralie Fargeat’s demented sophomore feature, The Substance, is not interested in half-measures. The director’s overcranked style is as unremitting as a double bump of uncut Bayhem,
- [Eureka](https://thetake-up.com/eureka/) - Lisandro Alonso is often cited as one of the reigning masters of slow cinema, but this perhaps undersells just how defiantly unconcerned the Argentine filmmaker is with hewing to the conventions of the international arthouse. His films are elusive, like meandering, slightly melancholy dreams whose meaning slips through your fingers at dawn’s first light. He
- [Close Your Eyes](https://thetake-up.com/close-your-eyes/) - They say time heals all wounds, but such an expression long pre-dates the advent of the motion picture: a living thing that has the power to continually open those stitches before they ever get a chance to close up. This is precisely the notion that concerns in Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice’s triumphant return to
- [Red Rooms](https://thetake-up.com/red-rooms/) - A few weeks ago, I watched a documentary series about Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, the so-called Ken & Barbie Killers. In the early 1990s, the Canadian couple killed three teenagers, one of them Homolka’s own sister. Bernardo videotaped the rape, torture, and murder of the other two girls, which is terrible, of course, but
- [Only the River Flows](https://thetake-up.com/only-the-river-flows/) - Somebody killed Granny Four. It’s the sort of news nobody wants to hear, and yet it surprises no one. That’s because there’s an assumption, a kind of inevitability to her death: It was probably the guy who lived with her. Everyone says he’s a madman. That’s even what they call him: Madman (Kang Chunlei). It
- [Cuckoo](https://thetake-up.com/cuckoo/) - During the first two-thirds of Tilman Singer’s sophomore film, Cuckoo, the vibes are impeccably odd. Even before openly bizarre things begin to happen, everything in the frame feels wrong. The film seems to occur in an indefinite time and place. We’re somewhere in the Bavarian Alps, but how far we are from civilization remains uncertain.
- [Alien: Romulus](https://thetake-up.com/alien-romulus/) - The Alien franchise has never really escaped the slime-slicked allure of its core premise: Trap a group of unwitting people in an isolated location and watch in horror as a fantastically lethal and hostile organism hunts them down one by one. Different filmmakers have constructed variously drab and florid shells around that central idea, whether
- [Last Summer](https://thetake-up.com/last-summer/) - By all appearances, Anne (Léa Drucker) has an enviable life. Fiftyish, married, and well off, she has built a reputable and successful career as an attorney, advocating for young sexual-assault victims. She and her slightly older husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), have adopted two young daughters whom they lavish with attention at their tasteful, luxurious home
- [Scala!!!](https://thetake-up.com/scala/) - Name a prominent figure in contemporary British arts and culture, and it’s likely they spent some time at the Scala. Although its countercultural heyday spanned just 15 years between the late 1970s and early 1990s, the eclectic theater spiritually dates back to the 1700s. That’s not the period documentarians Ali Catterall and Jane Giles are
- [Coma](https://thetake-up.com/coma/) - What’s going on? Genuinely asking. What in the world is happening right now? What has been going on for the last — oh, geez, let’s say — decade or so? The last several years specifically? From 2020 onward? Narrowing it down further doesn’t elucidate a thing. Can anyone even pretend to know? Asking feels beyond
- [Longlegs](https://thetake-up.com/longlegs/) - Something terrifying and unfathomable stalks the world in Longlegs. For decades, a mysterious serial killer has been creeping into quiet, middle-class homes in the Pacific Northwest. Like a spider crouching in a cobwebby corner, he oversees a recurring sacrament of evil, as seemingly well-adjusted, church-going fathers annihilate their families and then themselves. The interloper never
- [MaXXXine](https://thetake-up.com/maxxxine/) - When we last saw aspiring adult film starlet Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), it was the summer of 1979, and she had just backed a pickup truck over the skull of octogenarian psycho-killer Pearl (also Goth), to predictably fatal effect. Not without good cause, of course: Pearl and her husband, Howard, systematically slaughtered the cast and
- [Here](https://thetake-up.com/here/) - Some of life’s most memorable, most beautiful moments happen in transition. The universe, fate, destiny, chance, some otherworldly cosmic force … Whatever one believes is setting the course in this life, it has a knack for pulling strings and sowing seeds during periods of change. Unexpected reunions, new friendships, and other promising prospects always have
- [The People's Joker](https://thetake-up.com/the-peoples-joker/) - It’s difficult to imagine Joker exhibiting unreserved approval for his present era of pop-cultural ubiquity. After all, the Clown Prince of Crime has been portrayed in two separate Oscar-winning performances, which puts him in rarefied company: Only The Godfather’s Vito Corleone and West Side Story’s Anita can also claim such an honor. That factoid would
- [The Bikeriders](https://thetake-up.com/the-bikeriders/) - In 1963, a young photographer named Danny Lyon – then a rising star of New Journalism and an in-house documentarian for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – began hanging out with a venerable Chicago-area motorcycle club, the Outlaws MC. Lyon rode with the Outlaws off and on for roughly four years, entranced by their machismo,
- [Art College 1994](https://thetake-up.com/art-college-1994/) - A memory-palace movie can be a tricky beast to execute artfully. It’s a subgenre where the temptation to lean on cheap nostalgia and hollow re-creation is often too much for a filmmaker to resist. Successfully conjuring the feeling of a time and place – those elusive qualia that are instantly recognizable to those who were
- [Hit Man](https://thetake-up.com/hit-man/) - It’s summer-movie season. In the not-too-distant past, that meant an action movie, an animated flick, and a new studio comedy every couple of weeks. As of late, this kind of seasonal fare only exists in fragments of its former self. Before pushing up the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia any further, it’s worth saying: Not all
- [In Our Day](https://thetake-up.com/in-our-day/) - After a string of recent experiments with form, it’s initially a little disarming to see writer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer-producer Hong Sang-soo return to well-trodden ground. Whether it be his all-female-led The Woman Who Ran (2020) or the short-and-splintered Introduction (2021); the joyfully moribund In Front of Your Face (2021) or the quiet transcendence of The Novelist’s Film (2022);
- [The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed](https://thetake-up.com/the-feeling-that-the-time-for-doing-something-has-passed/) - Brooklyn millennial Ann (Joanna Arnow) is drifting in the doldrums of her own life. She works a vague, soul-numbing corporate job, the sort of environment where a clueless fiftysomething manager stands up in a meeting and declares, “If you’re not on Spotify, you’re behind the times.” She hails from a close-knit Jewish family, but a
- [Girls State](https://thetake-up.com/girls-state/) - Following its award-winning 2020 run, it makes perfect sense that Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s documentary Boys State would receive the sequel treatment. Rather than follow up with another iteration of the week-long Boys State summer-camp program run by the American Legion — perhaps shifting to a different state’s program after the first film’s focus
- [Spermworld](https://thetake-up.com/spermworld/) - There’s a particular level of skill needed to navigate the world of Facebook Marketplace. It’s easy enough to learn how it works. Click the icon, browse by category, message the seller, haggle over pricing, choose a meeting place, and — if it’s not actually a scam like the persistent voice in the back of your
- [Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces](https://thetake-up.com/steve-martin-a-documentary-in-2-pieces/) - There’s not just one Steve Martin. If one visited Disneyland or attended a Boy Scouts troop meeting in the Los Angeles suburbs in the early 1960s, they might have met Steve Martin, teen magician. Bought a ticket for just about any major touring act or Vegas residency in the late ’60s? One may remember a
- [African Film Fest 2024: Omen / Banel & Adama](https://thetake-up.com/african-film-fest-2024-omen-banel-adama/) - In her novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath observed that if “you expect nothing from somebody, you are never disappointed.” A basic concept, but nevertheless profound. No hope equals no letdowns. Imagine that. It’s not too far off from Alexander Pope’s famous 1727 quote, either: “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never
- [Io Capitano](https://thetake-up.com/io-capitano/) - At a glance, Io Capitano appears to be the sort of sober drama about a Very Important Issue that seems to periodically claw its way into the Best International Feature Oscar race. Lo and behold, director Matteo Garrone’s epic about a Senegalese migrant teenager’s hard-bitten odyssey finds itself alongside heavy hitters such as Perfect Days,
- [Perfect Days](https://thetake-up.com/perfect-days/) - As a showcase for the Tokyo Toilet Project, Wim Wenders’ latest narrative feature is a bona fide success. The project consists of a dozen public restrooms, all with unique features, crafted with the help of an international team of architectural creatives. It’s no joke: Beginning in 2020, a total of 17 different bathrooms throughout the
- [How to Have Sex](https://thetake-up.com/how-to-have-sex/) - When we first meet hard-partying British teenagers Tara (Mia KcKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis), and Skye (Lara Peake), they’ve already alighted in Malia, a notoriously bacchanalian resort town on the Greek island of Crete. The girls have recently finished their final year of school and are waiting fretfully for the results from their future-defining GCSE examinations.
- [Dario Argento Panico](https://thetake-up.com/dario-argento-panico/) - You don’t have to know anything about filmmaker Dario Argento to understand that his masterpiece Suspiria (1977) is something special. One can go into that film totally blind and still appreciate that the Italian horror legend’s most famous feature – a gruesome, psychedelic fairy tale about a ballet academy ruled by witches – is a
- [Youth (Spring)](https://thetake-up.com/youth-spring/) - The Zhili district of Houzhou, China, is home to some 18,000 garment workshops, the majority of them small-scale, privately owned operations. This is the buzzing heart of Houzhou’s children’s-apparel industry, which produces a staggering quantity of brightly colored, machine-sewn clothing, chiefly for the domestic market, but also for international buyers. There’s no automation here: Production
- [The Best Films of 2023](https://thetake-up.com/the-best-films-of-2023/) - It turned out to be a bit of a weird one, as cinematic years go. The film industry seemed shaky at the halfway point, but by November, both the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America had reached a deal with the studios and ended their respective months-long strikes. The threats of corporate
- [In Water](https://thetake-up.com/in-water/) - Actor Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho) has no idea what kind of movie he’s going to direct. All he knows is that he’s going to direct one. That part is certain. Meandering across South Korea’s gorgeous Jeju Island with fellow actor Nam-hee (Kim Seung-yun) and camera operator Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk) in tow, first-time filmmaker Seoung-mo awaits inspiration
- [Monster](https://thetake-up.com/monster/) - Many have strived but few have succeeded in mastering the art of the Rashomon (1950) riff. Although none can top the throwaway gag from Episode 23 of Season 10 of The Simpsons (1989- ) — “Come on, Homer, Japan will be fun! You liked Rashomon.” “That’s not how I remember it.” — there have been
- [Poor Things](https://thetake-up.com/poor-things/) - Emma Stone is no stranger to the role of the muse. Throughout her 15-plus years on the silver screen, she’s played the leading lady for a large assemblage of filmmakers. The list of names ranges from regrettable to respectable, encompassing everyone from Woody Allen to Ruben Fleischer to her latest collaborator: one Yorgos Lanthimos. Starting
- [Maestro](https://thetake-up.com/maestro/) - Although they come from the same revolutionary generation of New Hollywood filmmakers, it’s not often that you see Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese share billing. For more than four decades, American cinema has been all about the Spielberg and George Lucas collaborations or the Scorsese and Paul Schrader team-ups — rarely a Spielberg-Scorsese pairing. Their
- [Eileen](https://thetake-up.com/eileen/) - In the void between Thanksgiving and the end-of-the-year pile-up that inevitably occurs in the final weeks of the year, a handful of releases are inevitably dropped with little fanfare. Some are hidden gems without a viable marketing strategy, others are nationwide expansions following earlier New York and L.A. dates. And then there’s the stuff like
- [Oppehnheimer](https://thetake-up.com/oppehnheimer/) - Note: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.Christopher Nolan has been grappling with the cold tyranny of technological innovation since The Prestige (2006), which is as much about the search for awe in
- [Priscilla](https://thetake-up.com/priscilla/) - It’s been said that, in dreams, the human mind is incapable of generating new faces. Like the commonly held notion that no two fingerprints or snowflakes are alike, there’s no real way to verify such a claim with absolute certainty, though sleep psychologists have certainly done enough research for this to be assumed as fact.
- [How to Blow Up a Pipeline](https://thetake-up.com/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline/) - The title of director Daniel Goldhaber’s eco-terrorism thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a revealing one. It not only makes a kind of ominous promise to the audience – in the vein of Death of a Salesman (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), or The Virgin Suicides (1999) – but also signals the feature’s
- [Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour](https://thetake-up.com/taylor-swift-the-eras-tour/) - Taylor Swift finished the first U.S. leg of her record-obliterating, economy-boosting, discography-spanning Eras Tour with six nights in Los Angeles in early August. By the end of that month, she had announced Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour — a filmed version of the 40-plus song setlist planned for global theatrical release in October. To call
- [The Royal Hotel](https://thetake-up.com/the-royal-hotel/) - Late at night, long after the last call, in the dark hallway to the living quarters above the pub, a stumbling drunk looks sort of like a zombie. Even a stone-cold-sober bartender would have reason to be terrified at the sight of an overserved regular from the bar lumbering slowly toward their room — especially
- [Pacifiction](https://thetake-up.com/pacifiction/) - Set primarily on the island of Tahiti in the collectivité d’outre-mer of French Polynesia, director Albert Serra’s Pacifiction is replete with images of mesmerizing natural beauty. Every wide shot seems to glow with the warm, rainbow hues of a Paul Gauguin painting – particularly at dawn and twilight, when the sky flaunts preposterous gradients of
- [Streetwise](https://thetake-up.com/streetwise/) - Note: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist. Na Jiazuo’s debut feature Streetwise opens in Fengjie, Chongqing, in 2010, as a lanky young man named Dong Zi (Li Jiuxiao) solemnly scatters an urnful
- [Before, Now & Then](https://thetake-up.com/before-now-then/) - “Why is it that guilt always follows women?” asks Nana (Happy Salma) after a quiet moment away from the stressors of the day. This line — nestled in the middle of Before, Now & Then, writer-director Kamila Andini’s adaptation of a single section of Ahda Imran’s My Name Is Jais Darga — means everything in
- [Our Body](https://thetake-up.com/our-body/) - He spins a pair of tongs on his finger, like a gunslinger about to take his shot and holster his weapon in style. However, this is not a dusty Main Street in the 19th-century American West. This is a hospital in modern-day France, and our tong-toting hero is grabbing gametes in a cryogenic chamber. From
- [You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah](https://thetake-up.com/you-are-so-not-invited-to-my-bat-mitzvah/) - Note: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.Apart from bodily functions and silly voices, parenthood is the connective tissue that holds the bulk of Adam Sandler’s filmography together. From Billy Madison (1995) to
- [Plan 75](https://thetake-up.com/plan-75/) - Note: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.In Chie Hayakawa’s feature debut, Plan 75, Japanese lawmakers institute an unorthodox program to combat the country’s rising population of elderly citizens: government-sanctioned assisted suicide. It
- [The Last Voyage of the Demeter](https://thetake-up.com/the-last-voyage-of-the-demeter/) - Note: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist. The Victorian-set horror film has been somewhat out of fashion for a few decades, having achieved its last surge of true studio-backed popularity in the
- [Afire](https://thetake-up.com/afire/) - Note: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.Afire, the latest feature from writer-director Christian Petzold (Phoenix, Transit), presents a slow-boil character study of that pop-cultural bugaboo, the unlikeable protagonist. Leon (Thomas Schubert) is
- [Talk to Me](https://thetake-up.com/talk-to-me/) - Note: This review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist. Talk to Me is about stupid kids making stupid choices. This isn’t a criticism. The feature directorial debut of Australian horror YouTubers (and twin brothers)
- [The Taking](https://thetake-up.com/the-taking/) - For its first ten minutes, Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary The Taking waxes poetic about the natural beauty and symbolic power of Monument Valley, Ariz. Owing primarily to their conspicuous appearance in seven John Ford-directed Westerns between 1939-64, the area’s distinctive sandstone buttes and the surrounding desert valley have become synonymous with the American West in
- [The Best Films of 2023 (So Far)](https://thetake-up.com/the-best-films-of-2023-so-far/) - While 2023 is only half-over, it’s already been a tumultuous year for movies. The ongoing Writers Guild of America strike is but one symptom of an ailing industry dominated by leadership that seems to see art as mere content – or as fungible chits to be shuffled around to maximize quarterly profits. Same as it
- [Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour](https://thetake-up.com/barbie-nation-an-unauthorized-tour/) - Despite the hype that surrounds Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Barbie, 2023 does not mark the first time Mattel’s iconic fashion doll has been the subject of a feature film. Millennial Barbie fans will recall more than a dozen direct-to-video computer-animated films released in the 2000s, and Zoomers were treated to just as many specials
- [In the Dusk](https://thetake-up.com/in-the-dusk/) - The popular perception of Eastern European cinema is one of long, slow, and unrelentingly bleak films. This stereotype has been bolstered by a recent anti-intellectual social-media trend deriding any movie, real or imagined, that dares to stray even slightly outside American multiplex conventions. (A lot of these rants consist of hacky, inaccurate descriptions of Béla
- ["Blue Moon" and the Heartbreak of Fame](https://thetake-up.com/blue-moon-and-the-heartbreak-of-fame/) - Unlike the idiom with which it shares a name, the 1934 standard “Blue Moon” is anything but uncommon. The song is especially prevalent throughout film history, with its earliest appearances dating as far back as the Marx Brothers comedy At the Circus (1939). The frequency of its use hasn’t flagged since. It’s unsurprising, given that
- [Up in the Air: Taking Flight with Director Howard Hawks](https://thetake-up.com/up-in-the-air-taking-flight-with-director-howard-hawks/) - [Washington University’s The Common Reader, which originally commissioned this essay, has generously permitted the Take-Up to publish an expanded version of the piece. Readers who value brevity over exhaustivity will find a less discursive take on Howard Hawks in The Common Reader’s Aviation Issue.]Perhaps the long and still-ongoing love affair between cinema and aviation was
- [Stonewalling](https://thetake-up.com/stonewalling/) - Nothing commodifies interpersonal relationships faster than a side hustle. It is one of the most degrading aspects of the gig economy: the drive to transform hobbies into cash cows, pseudoscientific cosmetics into pyramid schemes, and social-media posts into advertisements-in-disguise. It rarely works out as well as it is advertised to the vulnerable individuals who take
- [Motion Detected](https://thetake-up.com/motion-detected/) - Amateurish acting, clunky writing, and chintzy production design can all drag down a low-budget horror film – and often do! – but nothing spells doom quite like a confused, poorly thought-out premise. Horror fans are a notoriously forgiving lot, and they are often willing to squint their way through even the cheapest, sloppiest productions, so
- [De Humani Corporis Fabrica](https://thetake-up.com/de-humani-corporis-fabrica/) - “We’ve all felt that the body was empty of meaning,” asserts surgical performance artist Caprice (Léa Seydoux) in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022), “and we’ve wanted to confirm that, so that we could fill it with meaning.” This declaration kept oozing to mind during De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a documentary that tunnels deep
- [Book Club: The Next Chapter](https://thetake-up.com/book-club-the-next-chapter/) - This summer, the girls are back. This is the tagline for Sanaa Hamri’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (2008), but it functions just as well for Michael Patrick King’s Sex and the City 2 (2010), Elizabeth Banks’ Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), Ol Parker’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), and, most recently,
- [Walk Up](https://thetake-up.com/walk-up/) - To write about a new Hong Sang-soo film is to write about the dozens that came before it. (And, given the director’s prolific output, the ones that have likely arrived in its wake.) To be clear: Walk Up marks the South Korean writer-director-producer-editor-composer’s 28th feature-length project. As it makes its tour across the United States,
- [Godland](https://thetake-up.com/godland/) - Roughly at the midpoint of Martin Scorsese’s masterful 17th-century-set missionary drama, Silence (2016), Portuguese priest Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) falls into the clutches of Machiavellian Japanese functionary Inoue Masashige (Issey Ogata). In his effort to coerce Rodrigues to submit to the shogunate and embrace apostasy, Inoue wheedles the Jesuit missionary with a befuddling blend of
- [Beef](https://thetake-up.com/beef/) - If the first season of Lee Sung Jin’s sneakily brilliant new series Beef is any indication, the show may one day be mentioned in the same breath as Vince Gilligan’s medium-defining twofer Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Better Call Saul (2015-22). It’s not just that Beef is great television – although it is that – but
- [One Fine Morning](https://thetake-up.com/one-fine-morning/) - Mia Hansen-Løve has never shied away from the semi-autobiographical. It has been at the heart of her work since her second film, Father of My Children (2009), but it truly comes into focus in her third, Goodbye First Love (2011). Yet all eight of Hansen-Løve’s features have a certain intimacy that can only come from
- [Every Dario Argento Film, Ranked](https://thetake-up.com/every-dario-argento-film-ranked/) - [Note: An earlier version of this article was originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens. This version has been revised, updated, and expanded.]At their worst, Dario Argento’s films are eye-glazingly boring. At their best, they are visual feasts of baroque manifest content and complex explorations of the viewer and the viewed. That mastery seemed
- [Murder Mystery 2](https://thetake-up.com/murder-mystery-2/) - Sequels are a relatively new thing for Adam Sandler. Throughout his 30-plus years in film, the Sandman has much preferred reunions over rehashes. In other words, he’d far rather employ familiar faces from his Happy Madison crew in original project after original project than revisit some character he’s already played before. It wasn’t until the
- [Enys Men](https://thetake-up.com/enys-men/) - In the flourishing yet factious landscape of contemporary horror cinema, Enys Men is the sort of feature that is inevitably affixed with that dreaded descriptor, “elevated horror.” Never mind that the phrase tends to elicit a response from most genre aficionados that ranges from abashed amusement to outright hostility. Somewhere, an entertainment writer is deploying
- [African Film Fest 2023: Tug of War](https://thetake-up.com/african-film-fest-2023-tug-of-war/) - The year is 1954. The people of the African archipelago Zanzibar have lived under a protectorate of the British Empire since 1890. Freedom fighters would like to see an end to the stranglehold of Britain’s rule — and they’d like the rest of Zanzibar to bravely band together with them against the Empire’s seemingly limitless
- [John Wick: Chapter 4](https://thetake-up.com/john-wick-chapter-4/) - The world of the John Wick films is one of rules. As the series’ characters are fond of reminding one another, it is adherence to ancient, esoteric laws that distinguishes the coldhearted business of criminal violence from the mere savagery of animals. The power of the High Table – the franchise’s mysterious, pan-national oligarchy of
- [Only in Theaters](https://thetake-up.com/only-in-theaters/) - Love letters to cinema have existed for practically as long as the studio system itself. As early as Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), in which the Great Stone Face plays a projectionist who dreams of himself as a character on the big screen, the industry has always adored a movie that adores movies. But, in
- [Resurrection](https://thetake-up.com/resurrection/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]A pivotal scene in the recently wrapped third season of HBO’s black comedy Barry (2018-) centers on a revealing and devastating character beat for eager, slightly self-deluded LA actress Sally Reed, marvelously portrayed by Sarah Goldberg. In a moment of crisis, the mask of goofball sweetness that has
- [No Bears](https://thetake-up.com/no-bears/) - To observe something is to change it. This adage is often invoked in both quantum mechanics and documentary filmmaking, but Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is the rare narrative feature that engages with the principle. Of course, Panahi is better positioned than most filmmakers to grapple with the sticky subject of the observer effect.
- [Huesera: The Bone Woman](https://thetake-up.com/huesera-the-bone-woman/) - I’m having a baby. This thought elicits excitement and anxiety for almost all mothers-to-be, including Valeria (Natalia Solián). She is young, married, and financially stable, and having a child is the natural next step toward a respectable bourgeois adulthood. Outwardly, Valeria radiates the kind of enthusiasm for motherhood that Mexican society (hell, almost every society)
- [The Horror Out of Nowhere: Director Robbie Banfitch](https://thetake-up.com/the-horror-out-of-nowhere-director-robbie-banfitch/) - Robbie Banfitch approaches an interview with a John Carpenter-esque cool. Similar to the Master of Horror, there is almost no pontificating about his new nerve-shredding horror film, The Outwaters. His motivation for this particular project will be recognizable to most aspiring filmmakers: “I was turning 30 and realizing that I hadn’t made a feature yet
- [Your Place or Mine](https://thetake-up.com/your-place-or-mine/) - It takes no stretch of the imagination to call When Harry Met Sally … (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and The Holiday (2006) three of the most significant pillars in the contemporary romantic-comedy blueprint. The trio — two from Nora Ephron, one from Nancy Meyers — serve as the upper echelon of what this subgenre
- [House of Bamboo](https://thetake-up.com/house-of-bamboo/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Note: This post contains moderate spoilers.Sometimes it takes a beat or two for great films to reveal themselves. Director Samuel Fuller’s Japan-set 1955 crime thriller, House of Bamboo, opens with some gorgeous widescreen images of a smoke-belching locomotive chugging through a wintery landscape. The train abruptly crawls to
- [Skinamarink](https://thetake-up.com/skinamarink/) - Many horror movies aspire to a general impression of nightmarishness, but it’s an uncommon film that aims to re-create, as closely as possible, the uncanny anti-logic of dreams. One reason that this feat is so rarely attempted is obvious: Nightmares might haunt our waking hours with their terrifying imagery and harrowing sensations, but they usually
- [80 for Brady](https://thetake-up.com/80-for-brady/) - Katharine Hepburn: The Lion in Winter (1968) and On Golden Pond (1981). Ruth Gordon: Harold and Maude (1971). Ingrid Bergman: Autumn Sonata (1978). The bulk of Nancy Meyers’ 21st-century output. For a period, growing older didn’t have to mean losing out on notable roles for a venerable actress. Somewhere along the line, however — right
- [She Is Love](https://thetake-up.com/she-is-love/) - Speaking on his film Husbands (1970) at the time of its release, John Cassavetes argued there’s a difference between ad-libbing and improvising. A founding father of the new generation of American independent filmmaking during the New Hollywood movement (in addition to a skilled actor in his own right), the director’s penchant for shooting off-the-cuff set
- [Knock at the Cabin](https://thetake-up.com/knock-at-the-cabin/) - Anyone who has taken an Ethics 101 class – or, alternatively, any devotee of NBC’s supernatural sitcom The Good Place (2016-20) – is probably familiar with the trolley problem. Originally presented and later developed by American philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, respectively, this thought experiment often serves as a vivid illustration for discussions
- [Shotgun Wedding](https://thetake-up.com/shotgun-wedding/) - It was never supposed to be Josh Duhamel. Since the earliest stages of production — a time that predates Hustlers (2019), Covid, and the 20th Century Fox-Walt Disney Studios merger — it was always going to be Ryan Reynolds as the above-the-title talent in Shotgun Wedding. There was a time when Reynolds and a TBD
- [Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio](https://thetake-up.com/guillermo-del-toros-pinocchio/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Poor Robert Zemeckis. In 2019, he imprudently stepped up and assumed directing duties for yet another crummy, soulless, live-action remake of a Disney animated feature. And not just any feature, but Pinocchio (1940), one of the most beloved, impeccable, and technically breathtaking films of Disney’s Golden Age. The
- [Welcome to The Take-Up](https://thetake-up.com/welcome-to-the-take-up/) - Welcome to The Take-Up. Whether you are a longtime reader, a loyal podcast listener, or a first-time visitor, consider this a preface to our newest endeavor and a preview of the work that will be featured here. Founded by film critics and frequent collaborators Kayla McCulloch, Joshua Ray, and Andrew Wyatt, The Take-Up is a new
- [The Best Films of 2022](https://thetake-up.com/the-best-films-of-2022/) - Movies about movies have existed for as long as the movies themselves have existed, but 2022 was the year when the specific concept of spectacle shouldered its way to the front of the cultural conversation.
- [The Best Films of 2021](https://thetake-up.com/the-best-films-of-2021/) - 2021 was a weird one. After the logistical, societal, and personal upheavals of 2020, it was supposed to be the year when everything returned to normal. Except it didn’t – or perhaps this is just the new normal? As Covid-19 ebbed and surged, multiplex and arthouse theaters both continued to struggle with attendance, the fortunes
- [Cha Cha Real Smooth](https://thetake-up.com/cha-cha-real-smooth/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Of all the various multi-hyphenates out there, that of the writer-director-actor is perhaps the most difficult to pin down. The title of “singer-songwriter” — while found across all musical genres — mainly evokes a folky rock sound. Likewise, the term “writer-director” brings to mind a serious auteur
- [Neptune Frost](https://thetake-up.com/neptune-frost/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Most people have probably never heard of tantalum, a rare, blue-gray transition metal derived from the ore columbite-tantalite (colloquially known as coltan). Yet most people use this obscure element every day: Tantalum is a critical component of the capacitors found in virtually every modern computerized device, from
- [X](https://thetake-up.com/x/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] The stunning opening shot of writer-director Ti West’s slyly audacious retro slasher flick, simply titled X, feels like a mini mission statement. Within the narrow window of a 1:37 Academy ratio frame, a nondescript two-story farmhouse squats on a green Texas hillock. The clouds appear pasted into
- [Benediction](https://thetake-up.com/benediction/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Few living filmmakers put as much of themselves on screen as Terence Davies. Never mind that the Liverpudlian auteur has only made one explicitly self-referential feature: His masterful documentary Of Time and the City (2008), a film that discovered universal truths in the sooty specifics of the
- [Montana Story](https://thetake-up.com/montana-story/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Montana Story is the kind of low-key, low-budget American indie drama that tends to slip through the cracks in our current cinematic era. Such unassuming films are buried by an avalanche of IP-exploiting blockbusters – and overlooked by viewers hungry for bigger, bolder
- [Severance](https://thetake-up.com/severance/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Like most great sci-fi mystery shows, AppleTV+’s new series Severance begins with an intoxicatingly enigmatic opening sequence. A thirtysomething woman (Britt Lower) awakens sprawled on a long table in a tastefully anonymous office conference room. She is dressed smartly in white-collar attire that feels three or four decades
- [Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers](https://thetake-up.com/chip-n-dale-rescue-rangers/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Inexplicably, through some remarkable feat of blank-check exploitation, two-thirds of the Lonely Island have taken two semi-obscure, somewhat fondly remembered anthropomorphic chipmunk brothers and crafted the most ingenious send-up of 21st-century studio filmmaking’s current obsession with self-referential, self-serving tributes to their own intellectual property. Is it all
- [Sheryl](https://thetake-up.com/sheryl/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] For celebrities who rose to fame in the digital age, it’s difficult to imagine a reality in which fans don’t know everything about their personal life, their big break, the highs and lows of their career, or the friends and enemies they made along the way. Take
- [Happening](https://thetake-up.com/happening/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] It is 1963, and French student Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is just starting to stretch her wings as an independent woman. Studying literature at a public university in Rouen, she is the no-nonsense straight-A striver in a trio that includes the flirty Brigitte (Louise Orry-Diquéro) and the quiet
- [Reflection](https://thetake-up.com/reflection/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] A sobering, iron-blooded drama about a prisoner of war who survives a hellish ordeal only to return home to a spiritual purgatory, writer-director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Reflection presents a story that hits hard and offers no easy answers. Unfolding in the early days of the Russo-Ukrainian War in
- [QFest 2022: Anaïs in Love](https://thetake-up.com/qfest-2022-anais-in-love/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier) is kind of a mess. Her apartment is missing some key elements (a sofa, a smoke detector, a functional stove), but at least her bookshelf is nice and organized. She’s perpetually running late — literally sprinting from place to place — and always seems
- [Father](https://thetake-up.com/father/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Tightly clutching the hand of her young daughter, a woman named Biljana (Nada Sargin) strides-sprints down the road of her rural Serbian village, her adolescent son trailing sullenly behind her. Pulsating with the determination of a furious mother and the hollow-eyed desperation of someone with nothing to
- [The Northman](https://thetake-up.com/the-northman/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]A heady ritual concoction of pitiless Dark Ages brutality and dazzling mythic imagery, The Northman is every inch the bloody, howling Viking action epic that one would expect director Robert Eggers to birth into the world. If the esteemed American auteur’s third feature film feels a little conventional,
- [Rock Bottom Riser](https://thetake-up.com/rock-bottom-riser/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] There’s a Simon & Garfunkel music video in the middle of Fern Silva’s new documentary Rock Bottom Riser. An enthusiastic lecturer is teaching a group of adults something like Poetry 101. She winds up the eager participants by slowly approaching the point of an exercise they’re about
- [Mothering Sunday](https://thetake-up.com/mothering-sunday/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) wanders around a mansion that isn’t hers. Her body moves like a ghost, silently drifting from room to room. She has the whole place to herself, free to eat and drink the luxurious foods and beverages that she could never afford. The golden
- [Dual](https://thetake-up.com/dual/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Sarah is dying. After waking up in a pool of bloody vomit, she visits a gastroenterologist and receives the grim news: She has a rare, untreatable stomach disorder that will kill her in a matter of months, or even weeks. The process will be painless, the doctor reassures
- [Yellowjackets](https://thetake-up.com/yellowjackets/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Any discussion of Yellowjackets inevitably comes around to Lost. Showtime’s new horror-thriller – which premiered in November and gradually built its audience through word-of-mouth prior to its season finale last week – has enough similarities to ABC’s 2004-10 series that the comparison certainly feels reasonable. Both shows focus
- [Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood](https://thetake-up.com/apollo-10½-a-space-age-childhood/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]A lot has happened in the 16 years between filmmaker Richard Linklater’s last animated film, A Scanner Darkly (2006), and his latest, Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood. With the release of Before Midnight (2013), he completed his Before trilogy (1995-2013) — a finale that stuck the landing
- [Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://thetake-up.com/everything-everywhere-all-at-once/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Regret is one of the constants of the human experience, along with death and taxes. Roads not taken have a habit of lingering in our memories like ghosts, tormenting us with speculative flickers of might-have-been alternate lives. Everyone screws up in moments both decisive and banal, no
- [The Bubble](https://thetake-up.com/the-bubble/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Cliff Beasts 6 isn’t a real movie, but the sentiment behind the fictional blockbuster at the center of Judd Apatow’s pandemic comedy, The Bubble, certainly feels authentic. Dubbed the 23rd-highest-grossing franchise — placing it somewhere among the likes of the Dark Knight trilogy (2005-12) and the Mission: Impossible
- [Barbarians](https://thetake-up.com/barbarians/) - Thrillers have long been absorbed with the self-conscious anxiety of the modern male, his relationship to violence, and his precarious position in a changing world. Sam Peckinpah’s still-divisive Straw Dogs (1971) is perhaps the nastiest and most conspicuous vehicle for such themes, although they can be discerned in earlier, subtler form in classic film noirs
- [Servants](https://thetake-up.com/servants/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Viewers who walk into writer-director Ivan Ostrochovský’s unnerving new drama Servants knowing nothing about the film might require some time to ascertain that it takes place in Czechoslovakia in 1980. No on-screen text announces the feature’s setting, and the forbidding Eastern Bloc production design obscures the exact
- [Windfall](https://thetake-up.com/windfall/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Filmmaker Charlie McDowell’s Windfall opens with what seems like the perfect crime: break into a tech billionaire’s secluded vacation home when he’s not there, steal all the loose cash lying around in his various drawers and cabinets, leave the place just messy enough to make him feel
- [Ranked: The 2022 Best Picture Nominees](https://thetake-up.com/ranked-the-2022-best-picture-nominees/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Look: It’s difficult for anyone to keep up these days. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, under immense pressure from their ABC overlords and others, is scrambling hard to stay relevant under a public microscope. However, it’s even harder to feel sympathetic for them; it’s not
- [Lingui, The Sacred Bonds](https://thetake-up.com/lingui-the-sacred-bonds/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]When we first meet Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), she’s hunched over a pile of discarded tires in the courtyard of her modest house. Sweat beads on her brow as she effortfully slices into the dust-caked rubber with a utility knife and rips out the thin steel cords. The
- [We Need to Talk About Cosby](https://thetake-up.com/we-need-to-talk-about-cosby/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]There’s a sense of inevitability to W. Kamau Bell’s new four-part documentary about Bill Cosby. Given recent well-received films and series addressing the predations of Michael Jackson (Leaving Neverland), Russell Simmons (On the Record), and Woody Allen (Allen v. Farrow), it was only a matter of time until
- [Lucy and Desi](https://thetake-up.com/lucy-and-desi/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] For audiences of a certain age — and nostalgic viewers both young and old — the comedy of Lucille Ball is regarded with only the utmost reverence. Whether one watched I Love Lucy (1951-57) loyally in the ’50s, fell in love with the show during reruns in
- [Hellbender](https://thetake-up.com/hellbender/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]In a roomy house deep in the Catskills, Izzy and her Mom live together in relative contentment. Izzy (Zelda Adams) must stick close to home, on account of a rare autoimmune disorder that makes contact with others potentially lethal. Accordingly, Mom (Toby Poser) homeschools her and does her
- [Marry Me](https://thetake-up.com/marry-me/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Much like her fellow 2000s-era studio-comedy leading actor Adam Sandler, Jennifer Lopez received a generous and well-deserved dose of praise for a surprising turn in a 2019 crime drama. Her Uncut Gems came in the form of Hustlers, filmmaker Lorene Scafaria’s third (and undoubtedly her greatest) feature, which
- [A Banquet](https://thetake-up.com/a-banquet/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Roughly in the middle of Peter Hyams’ unnecessary but solid sci-fi sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984), presumed-dead astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) inexplicably appears on his widow’s television screen and announces: “Something is going to happen. Something wonderful.” This prediction refers to an imminent astronomical
- [I Want You Back](https://thetake-up.com/i-want-you-back/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] It is now two years into the current decade, and exactly what kind of shape the romantic comedy will take in the 2020s remains unclear. After a great (and highly lucrative) run throughout the 1990s and into the early to mid-2000s, this once-successful subgenre went on serious
- [Catch the Fair One](https://thetake-up.com/catch-the-fair-one/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]You don’t need to know anything about Kali Reis to appreciate her intense, restless performance in the brutal new indie thriller Catch the Fair One. Her character, Kaylee, is a wiry, declining boxer whose skin is scrawled with tattoos and studded with piercings. A good pummeling usually tenderizes
- [Charli XCX: Alone Together](https://thetake-up.com/charli-xcx-alone-together/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] While the Covid-19 pandemic has felt like a creative dead zone for artists both famous and obscure, some have proven to be impervious to its effects. In the early days of the virus, back when uncertainty and despondency were in high supply and basic human needs were
- [Dispatch from Sundance 2022](https://thetake-up.com/dispatch-from-sundance-2022/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]While a mellow sci-fi drama, a documentary on the latest social-media sensation, and a coming-of-age adventure have very little to do with one another on the surface, Kogonada’s After Yang, Shalini Kanyayya’s TikTok, Boom., and James Ponsoldt’s Summering — all three playing at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival’s
- [Parallel Mothers](https://thetake-up.com/parallel-mothers/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Pedro Almodóvar began his filmmaking career by grabbing his audiences by their lapels and shouting in their faces. His 1980 debut, Pepi, Luci, y Bom, is a queer post-punk screwball comedy on a coke bender. Twenty-three years later, however, he was picking up an Academy Award for
- [NYFF 2022: Faces, Places](https://thetake-up.com/nyff-2022-faces-places/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]The 60th New York Film Festival returned to theaters on Sept. 30 and continues through Oct. 16. Its Main Slate has received plenty of attention for featuring new films from Noah Baumbach, Kelly Reichardt, Park Chan-wook, and Claire Denis, but its Currents selections are just as deserving of
- [NYFF 2022: Institutional Interrogations](https://thetake-up.com/nyff-2022-institutional-interrogations/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]As the latest films from James Gray, Jafar Panahi, and Joanna Hogg prepare for their 60th New York Film Festival premieres, the NYFF’s Currents slate continues with its own set of abstract works from new and innovative filmmakers the world over.While The Lens’ first NYFF dispatch touched on
- [A Hero](https://thetake-up.com/a-hero/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Murphy’s Law posits that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Farhadi’s Law — a term coined by this critic to describe the catastrophic moral dilemmas characters in Asghar Farhadi films tend to find themselves in — takes this notion a step further by arguing that
- [The Whaler Boy](https://thetake-up.com/the-whaler-boy/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Writer-director Philipp Yuryev’s bleak, slippery coming-of-age tale, The Whaler Boy, opens with an arresting fake-out. Somewhere in a large American city, a young camgirl (Kristina Asmus) arrives at her place of work – an anonymous building accessed via a neon-lit alleyway straight out of a Paul Schrader
- [Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes](https://thetake-up.com/beyond-the-infinite-two-minutes/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]The world has been stewing in the ongoing viral pandemic for so long now – two years and counting – that the “Covid film” subgenre has effectively fractalized into several distinct forms of cinema. You’ve got your eerily prescient pre-Covid productions, such as Before the Fire and SLIFF
- [Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery](https://thetake-up.com/glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]In a multimedia entertainment landscape where every franchise entry is fixated to the point of distraction on teeing up the next half-dozen feature films and streaming series, there’s something charmingly old school about the figure of the consulting detective. When Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, or Jessica Fletcher turns
- [Hellraiser](https://thetake-up.com/hellraiser/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Any filmmaker who endeavors to reimagine Hellraiser, writer-director Clive Barker’s iconic 1987 feature, confronts pitfalls beyond the usual sort that frustrate horror remakes. Salvaging a once-beloved franchise from the morass of shoddy direct-to-VOD sequels is an intimidating prospect all on its own. The original Hellraiser film, however,
- [Blonde](https://thetake-up.com/blonde/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] There are currently no Marilyn Monroe movies streaming on Netflix. There is, however, a movie about Marilyn Monroe (at least ostensibly): Blonde, filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s loose adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ titular novel (itself a loose retelling of the Old Hollywood icon’s tragically short 36-year life). It
- [Speak No Evil](https://thetake-up.com/speak-no-evil/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]One of the more fascinating horror subgenres that has exhibited a mini-boom in the past decade is what one might dub “The Cordial Invitation”: The oblivious protagonists answer a summons to an isolated location, where an initially benign (if eccentric) situation slowly escalates into a terrifying captivity scenario.
- [True Things](https://thetake-up.com/true-things/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Kate (Ruth Wilson) is terminally unextraordinary. She is pushing 40, lives alone, and appears to have exactly one friend, Alison (Hayley Squires), a married mother of three who regards Kate with a whiff of self-righteous pity. They work together at a nondescript public-assistance office, where Kate is
- [Flux Gourmet](https://thetake-up.com/flux-gourmet/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] British director Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy) has long dabbled in the absurd, but his latest film, the po-faced gastronomic farce Flux Gourmet, is the closest he’s ever come to making an outright comedy. Granted, it’s a comedy in the same sense that
- [Lux Æterna](https://thetake-up.com/lux-aeterna/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Clocking in at a little more than 50 minutes (including the end credits), Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna just barely qualifies as a feature-length film. As one might expect of the audacious French director, however, he packs quite a lot into that modest running time. The film opens
- [Murina](https://thetake-up.com/murina/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]The sun shines on the surface of the water so hypnotically when seen from below. Forever moving, always reflecting and refracting in profoundly beautiful ways, simultaneously dizzying and calming. It’s paradise, to be sure, but only to those who don’t live it. Case in point: The camera looks
- [One Man Dies a Million Times](https://thetake-up.com/one-man-dies-a-million-times/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]“A clock, hanging from a fragment of a wall, still ticking.” A particularly striking detail observed in the wreckage of a futuristic war-torn Leningrad, this line aptly describes the tireless efforts of those at the center of Jessica Oreck’s One Man Dies a Million Times. The documentarian’s narrative-feature
- [Hold Me Tight](https://thetake-up.com/hold-me-tight/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) has to get out of the house. Early one morning, while her husband, Marc (Arieh Worthalter), and young children, Lucie (Juliette Benveniste) and Paul (Aurèle Grzesik), sleep, she quietly gathers her things and heads toward the door. Clarisse walks out to the garage, pulls
- [Elvis](https://thetake-up.com/elvis/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Elvis Presley died at the age of 42, his once-enormous fortune nearly bled dry by a recent divorce, a debilitating opioid addiction, and the notoriously terrible business practices of one Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ Machiavellian manager. Parker outlived Presley by a significant (some might say unjust) margin, dying
- [Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris](https://thetake-up.com/mrs-harris-goes-to-paris/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Despite all she’s been through and the material comforts she may lack, Ada Harris (Lesley Manville) has clung for dear life to her unflinching optimism. For her, it’s more than a state of mind — it’s a way of life. It is Britain in 1957, and Ada’s husband
- [Both Sides of the Blade](https://thetake-up.com/both-sides-of-the-blade/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Sara (Juliet Binoche) has just seen François (Grégoire Colin) for the first time in years. As she doubles back to verify that it was in fact him speeding away on his motorcycle, she rushes through the Covid-19 check outside the office where she hosts a daily talk
- [Prey](https://thetake-up.com/prey/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]While Die Hard (1988) is arguably director John McTiernan’s most beloved and enduring feature, Predator (1987) is his masterpiece: a ludicrous, hyper-juiced, Reagan-era spectacle with a fantastically taut narrative. Expertly blending action and thriller elements with a superficially absurd sci-fi-horror high concept – a technologically advanced alien big-game
- [A Love Song](https://thetake-up.com/a-love-song/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Faye (Dale Dickey) is waiting. She’s unhitched her little trailer at Campsite No. 7 on a lakeshore nestled in Colorado’s high shrublands. She has a routine and a collection of small comforts: Café Bustelo coffee, Busch beer, a vintage transistor radio, and crawfish caught fresh from the lake’s
- [Three Thousand Years of Longing](https://thetake-up.com/three-thousand-years-of-longing/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) knows a lot about myths, legends, and fairy tales. She is a “narratologist,” one of those faintly ludicrous academic disciplines that only seems to exist in movies. (See also: The Da Vinci Code’s “symbologist,” Robert Langdon.) Simply put, Alithea is an expert on
- [Smile](https://thetake-up.com/smile/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Note: This review contains minor spoilers.If one were to take its trailers at face value – not to mention some of the buzz that followed its premiere at Fantastic Fest last week– the new horror film Smile is primo Spooky Season fare. At first glance, it certainly looks
- [Tár](https://thetake-up.com/tar/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Late in writer-director Todd Field’s viscous, disconcerting character study Tár, world-renowned classical composer-conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) steals a rare moment of domestic warmth with her young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). Observing the plush animals that the girl has arranged into a miniature orchestra, each toy brandishing
- [SLIFF 2022: Memories of My Father](https://thetake-up.com/sliff-2022-memories-of-my-father/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] For most American viewers, Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba is likely best known for his sun-dappled romantic dramedy Belle Epoque, which clinched the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1994 (and also screened at SLIFF). However, Trueba has been working at a steady clip since the early
- [SLIFF 2022: Nanny](https://thetake-up.com/sliff-2022-nanny/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Art-horror films love liminal spaces, those uncanny borderlands of waking life where nothing feels settled. The masterstroke of writer-director Nikyatu Jusu’s unnerving feature Nanny lies in its recognition that from the perspective of the immigrant, all spaces are liminal. For Senegalese migrant Aisha (Titans breakout Anna Diop),
- [SLIFF 2022: Corsage](https://thetake-up.com/sliff-2022-corsage/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Duchess Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie in Bavaria was disillusioned with the throne even before she married Emperor Franz Joseph I — Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary — at the age of 16. Born into a longstanding German dynasty but raised without the strict standards so often associated
- [SLIFF 2022: Holy Spider](https://thetake-up.com/sliff-2022-holy-spider/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.]Director Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider opens with a scene that will be familiar to American aficionados of urban crime stories: a sex worker prepares for a night on the mean streets of a restless city. She shrugs into her bra, applies makeup, and kisses her sleeping child. Unexpectedly,
- [SLIFF 2022: Of Medicine and Miracles](https://thetake-up.com/sliff-2022-of-medicine-and-miracles/) - [Originally published at Cinema St. Louis’ The Lens.] Dr. Carl June never thought he’d see patients. As a matter of fact, he never thought he’d be a medical professional at all. However, when he was drafted during the Vietnam War and then recruited to attend medical school, there was little choice in the matter. This

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- [About The Take-Up](https://thetake-up.com/about/) - The Take-Up was founded in January 2023 by St. Louis-based film critics Kayla McCulloch, Joshua Ray, and Andrew Wyatt. After working together for several years as contributors to Cinema St. Louis’ official blog, The Lens, they struck out on their own and established The Take-Up as a new, independent online platform for criticism. Their goal
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