• Cry-Baby
  John Waters, 1990, ★★★★

• Tagged: May 2026
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This franchise took a left turn when a weird cult in blonde wigs showed up at the very end of last year’s adequate-at-best 28 Years Later. It was a conspicuously goofy addendum, and it feels even less natural when the psychotic, Teletubbies-obsessed cult takes center stage in this direct sequel, roaming the post-apocalyptic British countryside looking for un-zombified victims to carve up in Satanic sacrifice. Elsewhere on the island, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, both films’ MVP by a mile, but still unable to save the material from itself) passes the time spinning Duran Duran hits while trying to rehabilitate a well-hung zombie who looks like he was fired from the WWE for refusing to bathe. These two narrative strands inevitably entwine, culminating in—you guessed it—a flaming Iron Maiden dance number around a 30-foot tower of skulls.

The ingredients sound like unhinged fun, but the stew they make is just too self-consciously rich, whether it’s desperately trying to shock you with the cult’s nihilistic bloodlust or move you with Kelson’s tender optimism.

One thing The Bone Temple does right is to sideline Spike, the young protagonist of the previous film’s coming-of-age story, but his cartoonish innocence still gets enough screen time to grate. If the box office gods are forgiving, his puppy-dog eyes will be back yet again in the next film to join forces with at least one very familiar face from from 28 Days Later for some full-circle fan service.

• Tagged: May 2026, film diary, film, review, Nia DaCosta
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I had a great time with this one. I wish I had gotten it together to see it in a crowded theater. I also wish its office politics were less generic, and that its crummy digital effects weren’t one more drop in the ocean of reasons I’m convinced computers were a mistake. But man, it had been way too long since we had a fresh opportunity to picture Sam Raimi cackling from behind the camera as he drowns his actors in buckets of glop. Anyone in Hollywood could have made Send Help a serviceable popcorn thriller, but only Raimi, bless him, would go above and beyond to make it this gross and this funny.

• Tagged: May 2026, film diary, film, review, Sam Raimi
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For a few years, I was learning faster than at any other time in my life. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I went from feeling like I was in over my head to feeling incredibly competent.

I could do anything.

I don’t know if I’ll get to a place where I share his optimism for what’s to come, but his smarts and thoughtfulness certainly make me want to try.

For the first time in years, I see possibility. Not utopia. AI’s problems aren’t being exaggerated. Like every technology before it, it will reflect the people building it. But possibility is the right word for what I’m feeling, and I haven’t felt it in a while. Not just for young people who haven’t lost their enthusiasm. For people who have been here long enough to remember when the web was open, generous, optimistic, and built by people who simply wanted to make things and share them with the world. That sharing was an expression of our gratitude, and that gratitude is still there.

I think experience matters now more than ever. I think curiosity matters. And I think a lot of people who may have quietly counted themselves out have something important to contribute.

I hope you’re right, Chris. Happy birthday!

🔗 Go to this link

• Tagged: May 2026, technology, links, Chris Shiflett
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I’m known to enjoy a film made by clumsy amateurs reaching for something beyond their means, and this unfathomably earnest love letter to the beach towns of Delaware is definitely that. But even if its many perplexing choices provoke the occasional chuckle, its failed attempts to mine drama from Holocaust survivors, homophobia, and sexual assault make it cringeworthy in all the wrong ways. To make matters worse, it has a character named Gallagher who doesn’t smash a single watermelon.

• Tagged: May 2026, film diary, film, review, Raghav Peri, PhilaMOCA, Philadelphia, PA
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• Camp Skin Graft: Now Wave
  The Browns, U.S. Maple, The Flying Luttenbachers, Lake of Dracula, Yona-Kit, and 28 more, 1997

Added to the film diary:

• No Way Out
  Roger Donaldson, 1987, ★★★

• Tagged: May 2026
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I’m not big on movies loudly foregrounding firearms these days, so I thought it might not be the best time to finally watch Hard Boiled, but I did it anyway, and even though it may be the single most trigger-happy movie I’ve ever seen, its effect is entirely different than what I’ve come to expect from most movies fitting that description. I read a review that derides Hard Boiled as less symphony than juvenile heavy metal power ballad, but I don’t think it’s either of those things. The latter would make it a Michael Bay movie. The former would make it, I don’t know, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? But Hard Boiled is its own phantasmagoria, fully aware of how outlandish its extravagant violence is, and fully committed to that outlandishness like a solemn oath.

• Tagged: May 2026, film diary, film, review, John Woo
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It might seem surprising that Brad Dourif’s intense and fascinating performance in Wise Blood didn’t get him much higher visibility in Hollywood, but it’s hard to imagine a more singularly challenging character for audiences than Flannery O’Connor’s anti-preacher, Hazel Motes, whose all-consuming contempt Dourif projects forcefully and without apology. If this film underwent test screenings, it seems to have refused to be influenced by them, with the possible exception of its ill-fitting, whimsical score, something it would definitely be better without.

• Tagged: May 2026, film diary, film, review, John Huston
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Based on Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 novel of the same name, The Big Clock was released in 1948, and Hollywood took a second swing at it with No Way Out in 1987. As I write this in 2026, another 39 years have passed and we’re due for a third iteration, which has me thinking. I was 11 when No Way Out came out, and though I hadn’t seen it before now, and it’s dated in many ways, its world doesn’t seem wildly different to me from the one we live in now. The Big Clock, on the other hand, feels ancient. If some new version of the story were made this year, and someone pushing 50 watched it in 2065, would the same dynamic hold? Would the 2026 version be recognizable to them and the 1987 version a total relic? Is it inevitable that we feel so removed from a time well before we were born, or is that feeling of remove relative to the specific timeframe’s rate of change around politics, fashion, technology, social mores, etc? And in the case of film, how much influence do the trappings of the craft have? The Big Clock’s grayscale soundstages, costumes, and dialogue, polished and sexless, feel much more artificial than No Way Out’s horny, full-color quasi-naturalism. Was 1948 so different from 1987, or was it just the way we made movies that was different?

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• Tagged: May 2026, film diary, film, review, John Farrow
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A surrealist nightmare of expressionist lighting and skewed compositions made from colossal pre- and postwar European architecture, oppressive even when it’s beautiful, its sharp angles stuffed to the gills with detritus, evoking a civilization abandoned in a panic. Even the scenes with hundreds of extras feel lonely. It talks too much but my god does it look incredible.

• Tagged: May 2026, film diary, film, review, Orson Welles
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