Original Cinemaniac

Movies

The Painted Bird

            Director Vaclav Marhoul’s harrowing and beautiful adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird is a nearly 3-hour, black & white, Hieronymus Bosch-like hellscape.  Petra Kotlar hauntingly plays the young boy Petra, sent to a rural village in Eastern Europe to…
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Relic

            Director Natalie Erika James’ first feature-length film is the most terrifying, and surprisingly moving, film you’ll see this year.              Emily Mortimer plays Kay, who drives from Melbourne with her older daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) because a neighbor reports to the…
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Butt Boy

            Despite the outrageous premise, writer/director & star Tyler Cornack’s film plays it (sort of) straight, which makes for an unforgettable, jaw-dropping, 99 minutes of celluloid madness.             Cornack plays the lead- sad sack Chip Gutchell, an office IT drone in a…
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The Wretched

            Something wicked this way comes to a small lakeside resort town in brothers Brett & Drew Pierce’s skillful, genuinely creepy, chiller. Troubled teen Ben (John-Paul Howard) has been sent to live with his dad (Jamison Jones) and work the summer…
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True History Of The Kelly Gang

            There is a galvanizing, homoerotic, punk-rock energy coursing through director Justin Kurzel’s unorthodox retelling of the oft-told tale of mythic 19th century Australian bandit Ned Kelly (here played with fierce intensity by “1917” star George Mackay).             Raised in a tin shack…
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Haggis-heart

Paramount Pictures’ planned a 25th anniversary big-screen return of the 1995 film Braveheart, but with theaters closing across the country it’s doubtful that is going to happen. Maybe that is the bright spot in all this crisis- at least you don’t…
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Swallow

            Opening at IFC Center on March 6th is a fabulously bizarre feminist horror fable by Carlo Mirabella-Davis with a remarkable and heartbreaking performance by Haley Bennett. Haley plays Hunter, the trophy wife of successful businessman Richie (Austin Stowell). They live…
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The Color Out Of Space

            In Richard Stanley’s brilliant, nightmarish, hallucinatory version of a H. P. Lovecraft story, a meteorite falls from the sky outside Nathan Gardner’s (Nicolas Cage) remote woodland Arkham farmhouse. Gardner lives there with his wife (Joley Richardson), their three children…
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