Guest contributor Russell discusses the recent animated film trend of directly addressing toxic masculinity. Between how The LEGO Movie 2, LEGO Batman and Ralph Breaks The Internet tackles the topic, he wishes more movies like these had been around when he was a kid.

Carlo is here, in living color, with a brand new video essay on Shaw Brothers’ The Vengeful Beauty (1978), a proto-girls with guns movie.

Since La Dolce Vita premiered, we've been treated to so many versions and variations of this story, all with varying degrees of glitz and sadness. While there have been no direct remakes, there has been a pretty impressively diverse group of films that have been inspired by it.

With the character of Dr Klemperer, Luca Guadagnino and David Kajganich make an assumption of guilt that should be unpacked. In weighing the insinuations of this storyline, Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi comes to mind.

Movies spend a lot of time ruminating on how much of who we are is inherent and how much is learned. Yet the films Good Manners, The Woman, and Spring ask us: what if nothing about us is a choice?

“The worst animated feature film of all time.” Argle-bargle or foofooraw? We find out!

There are scores of horror movies that follow formulas, rules, and tropes to the bitter end. Even with the 2018 glut of art house horror, plenty of familiar aspects linger. To really see beyond the rainbow on this one, we need to look to experimental horror.

Back in the ‘90s there was this one guy, a stoic blob who had neither much in terms of discernible charm, nor was he ever willing to show off much of anything he picked up in all his years training under several alleged martial arts masters, but still gained worldwide fame in the world of kicking ass and taking names. Join us, as we take a look at the early works of Steven Seagal, and question his status as a citizen of Earth.

"Girls With Guns" as a sub-genre was an absolute phenomenon in Hong Kong between the ‘80s and ‘90s where the climate for female empowerment in male-dominated exploitation cinema reigned supreme.

Freddy’s Dead is both a deviation from, and constrained by its formula. But I love it because it’s a fascinatingly desperate attempt to re-capture some of the magic that kickstarted Freddy Mania. Join us as we perform a compost-mortem on this universally reviled sequel in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

Take a dip into the world of Australian cinema’s homoerotic undertones – from Mad Max to The Rover. A country so manly that in some ways it’s like masculinity folded in on itself and emerged as a new beast.

In light of Deneuve's comments on #MeToo, Jenna muses on how it is that somebody so close to Repulsion could somehow miss this point of the movie entirely.

There is a spectrum for how humans think of the future: at one end are the people who look forward to Mars colonies and widely available sex robots, and at the other end is the Unabomber. Before We Vanish, Antiviral and Mindhack #savetheworld teeter somewhere in-between completely fatalistic and blindly idealistic.

Two-and-a-half decades before the stars of Charlize Theron and Uma Thurman had risen, there was a little girl from Delaware who, with a little perseverance and a whole lot of talent, took Hong Kong by storm.

Veronica takes a closer look at a different kind of odyssey. Featuring Showgirls, Good Time and Tangerine.

What is it that interests humans in seeing others killed, maimed, or tortured? A look at giallo, grindhouse, and the beyond.

A look at some of the more obscure singing cowboys films that build a mythical America I want to remember - including Gene Autry, Herb Jeffries, Dorothy Page and Tito Guízar.

Stand By Me and Now and Then faces mortality, while The Transfiguration and Eyes of My Mother accept it head-on.

Very first sign of summer, Chief, sharks come cruisin'.

All earth was but one thought — and that was death
Immediate and inglorious