Original Cinemaniac

Movie Reviews by Dennis Dermody

Infinity Pool

            If you think you’ve seen how horrible the wealthy can be at ritzy resorts by watching The White Lotus you still will be unprepared when you experience Brandon Cronenberg’s bizarre, twisted, hallucinatory- Infinity Pool.             Alexander Skarsgard plays James Foster, an…
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Saint Omer

            Quietly devastating film by Alice Diop about Rama (stunning Kayije Kagame), a writer and professor attending the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Franco-Senegalese graduate student, who murdered her 15-month-old baby on a beach in France.              Laurence is enigmatic…
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Takashi Miike’s Connect on Hulu

            One of my favorite filmmakers- the prolific, gloriously gozo Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) has directed a whacked-out new South Korean 6-part series on Hulu called Connect and it’s surreal, gory, suspenseful, action-packed, addictive insanity.              Ha Dong Soo (criminally…
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Hunt

            Hunt Is a propulsive, action-packed South Korean spy thriller directed and starring Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game).             It begins in Washington D.C. in 1983 during a botched assassination attempt on the South Korean president, whose authoritarian regime has caused student uprisings…
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The Menu

            By all means, make a reservation to see The Menu, a fiendishly enjoyable dark comedy, smartly directed by Mark Mylod and topped with a fabulously sardonic performance by Ralph Fiennes.             The plot concerns a group of well-heeled epicureans, arriving by…
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