The mood on this one is great, shot in Greenwich Village with great scenes set in clubs and on the streets. Legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe gives it groovy, green-heavy lighting; he said he had a blast experimenting with tinted lights and filters on this one. It also benefits from an extremely charming supporting cast: Jack Lemmon playing a gay-coded warlock, Ernie Kovacs as a paranormal-obsessed writer, and, most importantly, a remarkable cat named Pyewacket. Novak’s Gillian is about as bewitching as any woman has ever been on film (this and I Married a Witch make a great double feature of contrasting but magnificent examples of eye-popping beauty and screen command with Lake and Novak). Funny that it’s ever-great Stewart who is the closest thing to a wet blanket among the bunch; he’s a bit too old and stodgy for the part, and it’s no surprise this is generally considered his final turn as a romantic lead.

It’s a lightweight affair, and its ending feels a bit like a selling out of the spirit of witchy, feminist freedom that Gillian displays throughout the film, but it’s a good time nonetheless.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

But the film is completely backbroken by its slim, repetitive story that drags on for a grating two hours. Witch antiheroine Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson) ensnares and kills men one at a time like she’s a slasher villain crossed with a black widow, but the cadence and payoff of those scenes never escalate in a rich enough manner to justify making this as more than a short film, or maybe one of those 75-minute turbo-features.

That said, I’m tempted to give the film a passing grade just on how brilliant the production is and how well-cast Robinson is in the lead. The film has gorgeous colors, lovely costumes and makeup, terrific sets, and an overall intoxicating visual vibe. It’s too bad I just couldn’t get on its narrative wavelength.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

Where the film stumbles is in the final act when a new conflict emerges after Jennifer and Wallace get together that turns Jennifer’s father Daniel (Cecil Kellaway) into an antagonist. It’s significantly less fun than everything that leads up to it, but not enough to blunt the overall delight of I Married a Witch.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

Contained within that technical mastery are some powerful stories: A womanizing priest named Grandier (Oliver Reed), who rules Loudun, creates a sexual furor bordering on bewitchment among the residing nuns, most especially Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). Meanwhile, a group of civic and religious bureaucrats connive to wrest control of Loudun from Grandier. The film’s characterization is searing and occasionally nuanced; Grandier is both a true cad and a true believer; Jeanne is a bundle of contradictions.

And yet I found the film tough to get through. I wouldn’t go quite so far as Roger Ebert, whose sarcastic 0-star review mocks it as a self-important parade of torture and orgies dressed up as brave truth-telling, but I do find it to be an edgelord, try-hard piece of art, displaying contempt for everything it encounters. A little bit of punk-rock fury aimed at all pillars of the establishment is okay, especially when you’re a magician of a filmmaker, but The Devils left me with the same gross aftertaste as Texas Chain Saw and Trainspotting: It pushes its buttons of dour cynicism so hard it circles back to uninteresting for me. It features some filmmaking for the ages, but is just a bit too frothing for me to give it anything more than an academic thumbs-up.

(N.B.: Although The Devils is inspired by a documented historical “witch craze” incident, it is essentially not a witch film, but I included it here because I watched it in prep for the podcast about witch movies. Also: after decades of censorship, a 4K restoration of Russell’s uncut version opened in North American theaters for a currently-active one-week run.)

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

What makes this movie so powerful is the contrast between Rosemary’s dreary domestic life and her growing fear that she is bearing spawn of Satan. She is belittled in so many ways – demeaned by neighbors, dismissed by her husband, betrayed by a doctor she confides in. Any of these actions in isolation might be a normal thing that happens to a pregnant woman living in a stately old Manhattan apartment building and married to an actor; yet in accumulation they create a deeply unsettling depiction of evil.

Mia Farrow is phenomenal as Rosemary and she’s buoyed by a great supporting cast including John Cassavetes as her husband and Ruth Gordon as her domineering neighbor. (Gordon won an Oscar for her performance, the movie’s only golden statuette.)

It’s a miraculous achievement of a horror film, perfectly paced and so canny in building dread with only sparing use of supernatural imagery (really just a dream sequence of uncertain literal reality). I’m especially infatuated with the production, turning Rosemary’s apartment into a Gothic prison full of suffocating rooms and haunted corridors.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

Directed by cinematic titan Carl Theodor Dreyer, the film is textbook European art cinema: It is so precise, patient, and still in its observation that it occasionally feels stiff. But it is truly marvelous as drama, with rich and surprising characterization, and a steady, doomed arc for its characters. It’s also a feminist and anti-fascist commentary without ever beating its themes’ drums.

The film follows a priest organizing the local witch-burnings, Rev. Absalon (Thorkild Roose); his young wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin), whose mother was accused of witchcraft but spared in exchange for Anne’s hand; and his son Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), who falls in love with Anne. Anne and Martin’s connection grows stronger as the flames of the witch craze climb higher and higher.

Day of Wrath is an immaculate achievement. For a slow, talky film, it is always engaging. It’s gorgeously produced in enclosed spaces (the only outdoor shots occur when characters are feeling romantic and unburdened, or else frenzied during a witch burning), with world-class lighting, cinematography, and shot blocking. Dreyer employs gentle but powerful camera movements. The acting, especially Movin’s, is outstanding. Terrific film.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

Rodriguez pays tribute to his friend and mentor, Quentin Tarantino, with a genuinely clever narrative structure that is simultaneous an anthology film (a bunch of Shorts, if you will) and a nested whole, a la Pulp Fiction. The story revolves around a magic wishing stone. Of course every wish goes wrong, not because of a problem with the stone, but because every character is really bad at making wishes.

And as with all of Rodriguez’s films, Shorts maintains an element of introspection among the chaos. Here, he reckons with families and friendships falling apart at the seams despite being more connected than ever via technology.

To be honest, I might be underrating this a bit. I went in with gutter-level expectations but I got a kick out of the twisted visuals and laughed a few times in spite of my better judgment. It’s that prepubescent id I never quite grew out of, I guess.

Also, I understand there are deep cultural connections between the magic of Linsanity and the wave in Asian American hate crimes since 2020, but it’s still kind of a curveball downer of a topic for a doc about something inspiring that happened 10 years ago.

Why is the comedian Hasan Minhaj narrating 60% of this? Why does he talk more than Jeremy Lin?

While it crosses over into something transgressive a few times — for example, a debate about who gets their limited free abortion slots (a rape victim, a 12 year old, etc.) that plays like dinnertime banter — but in general what’s most surprising about Call Jane is how down-the-middle and low-stakes the movie is given its subject matter.

The film presents itself as uplifting slice of feminism, which I suppose is part of the point: its characters (and its filmmakers) want to normalize reproductive rights the same we do voting rights and freedom of the press and the usual topics of films like this. But it still feels so tonally jarring to me.

It’s well-made enough as a production. Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver are reliably charismatic, and Cory Michael Smith gives the film a blast of dark wryness as the doctor performing the abortions. But it just feels a little bit baffling and off-key its whole runtime.

Andrea Riseborough really is that good: she’s funny and humane and sad in perfect balance. It’s not on the level of Blanchett or Yeoh (or the criminally un-nominated Mia Goth in Pearl) where we’ll still be talking about it a decade from now, but the Academy has nominated less worthy performances, even this year. (See: Judd Hirsch’s 90 seconds on screen.)

Marc Maron is pretty great, too.