Despite being a world-famous, Oscar-winning leading man and action hero, Nicolas Cage has spent his last couple of decades in the public consciousness more as a meme than as a human actor. The majority of Cage’s roles during this period have, to one degree or another, traded on this fact: Panos Cosmatos utilized him as a gonzo cultural talisman in his midnight staple Mandy; Michael Sarnoski’s deceptively heartfelt Pig is as much in conversation with its actor’s public history as a Rick Rubin comeback album; and, of course, last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent literally cast Cag ..read more

What reason was there for a new Hunger Games film? Nostalgia for a decade ago, when YA reigned supreme just as Marvel was rising to power? A last-ditch attempt to wring some money out of a known property? The greatest question of all: why is The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes actually good? Why did they make a real movie for no reason? No one needed this to be a gripping, bleak drama about a young man coming to understand how the world works, a young man opportunistic in a way that always seems to leave people dead. But, for some reason, the Hunger Games prequel is possibl ..read more

I believe that behind the longevity of an Internet story is the applied imagination of the reader. The online folk tales in which the person is pictured or there’s a full name that can be easily doxxed to oblivion is like a respiratory infection— explosively present but temporary (God willing, at least). But the stories where we can project our experiences and conjure our own images possess a longer shelf life, allowing them to float in the space between nonfiction and imposed embellishments. Cat Person, a short story written by Kristen Roupenian for The New Yorker, made its inflammatory roun ..read more

The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF) runs in-person in Tallinn, Estonia from November 3-19. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski will be reviewing and interviewing live from Estonia as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check out his website for updates on additional coverage.  INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL (2023) — dir. Pham Thien An The winner of the Caméra d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell will surely join the ranks as the latest surefire Letterboxd-type cinephile slow-cinema favorite. A Vietnamese language fil ..read more

In the Slasher Movie era– that 1980s gold rush in which every low-budget auteur and mercenary exploiteer sought to capitalize on the runaway success of Halloween and Friday the 13th– Robert Hitzlik’s Sleepaway Camp stands alone. Nestled in the video store shelves with its nondescript title and appropriately striking cover, Sleepaway Camp quickly became a word-of-mouth sensation among the gorehound set. Where your Freddies and Jasons offered a familiar bag of tricks, Sleepaway Camp was something more subversive: a black comedy (intentional or otherwise– it was occasionally hard to tell the dif ..read more

The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF) runs in-person in Tallinn, Estonia from November 3-19. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski will be reviewing and interviewing live from Estonia as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check out his website for updates on additional coverage.  HADA (2023) dir. Alex Mañas — World Premiere During my junior year of college, a co-worker and friend at the campus writing center and I talked about how great it was that nobody had died in three years at our college—a statistical improbability. I commented to her that it was es ..read more

A experiment that pays off handsomely Writer-director Eddie Alcazar has crafted a brand new world with Divinity, a fascinating film that I’m not entirely sure is successful, but is fantastic to look at and appreciate. Alcazar takes the exact risks modern filmmaking should be taking, as does Steven Soderbergh, who funded the film and executive produced. In a strange future (or perhaps alternate universe), scientist Sterling Pierce (Scott Bakula) has devised a serum called “Divinity” that could make human beings immortal. His son Jaxxon (Stephen Dorff) now distributes Divinity, causing a major ..read more

A couple weeks ago I finally sat down to watch Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, having ignored it in theaters because it was not directed by Steven Spielberg or written by George Lucas. I was right to do so, but I was still curious to see how it turned out. What was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Disney is now so divorced from good filmmaking that a return to form seems all but impossible. Lousy CGI de-aging, languid pacing, crappy green screen, actors feeling like hostages, an abrupt and clearly reshot ending… it’s got everything! This is the modern Disney film, and audiences a ..read more

Wim Wenders’ 2023 slow beauty Perfect Days is a revelation into how we spend our time, where we pay attention, and what it looks like to exist in the present. It requires long attentional devotion, fully utilizing the medium of film and the “slice of life” genre to emphasize the glistening, unmatched special of the present.  Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) starts every day by waking up at the same time. He gets a coffee from the vending machine and listens to an array of incredible music on a cassette tape in his car (“House of the Rising Sun,” “Brown Eyed Girl,” and “Redondo Beach,” to name a f ..read more

Unlike many under-dog stories in which a character may accomplish the feats we inferred them to be capable of, Sunshine (2007) meets us on the way down. A story that, despite its strong undercurrent of altruism, paradoxically concerns itself with humans at our most utilitarian. More a tale of how hope can strip us down, rather than build us up — excellently conveyed by a stellar cast and the nuanced world that Boyle and company create.  The movie takes place in an alternate reality where the sun needs a tune-up, and the aptly (yet poorly) titled Icarus-2 barrels towards the star in an at ..read more