Showgirls (1995) Review
Read as a Verhoeven satire of the American Dream, the film makes sense. The 7 accounts honestly for execution problems that remain even when the satirical reading lands.
Tag: American Decay (Page 19)
1980sVice Squad (1982) – Review
Wings Hauser's Ramrod is one of genre cinema's genuinely frightening villains, casual, flat, and relentless across a single Hollywood night. That's not a bad place for a genre film to land, it means the ambition outpaced the execution in specific,…
1970sHardcore (1979) – Review
Paul Schrader grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's a hard film to watch, not because of what it shows, which is less explicit than its reputation suggests, but because of what it understands about…
American DecayVice Noir Movies – Where the City Eats Its Own
The darkest streets of American cinema: twenty-one films that descend into urban vice, neon-lit corruption, and moral rot with the unflinching eye of a crime reporter and the visual grammar of noir. These are the movies that looked at the…
1980sRoboCop (1987) Review
RoboCop is a better film than its premise suggests and a more subversive one than its marketing implied. Paul Verhoeven made a corporate satire inside a violent action film, and the two registers enhance each other instead of competing.
1980sThe Running Man (1987) Review
The Running Man is a better idea than film. The concept, a death sport television show operating as the primary mechanism of social control in a dystopia.
American DecayCheckout Line at the End of the World
When an asteroid fills the sky and the world has forty minutes left, a grocery store cashier named Denise keeps doing her job, scanning items and asking paper or plastic, because the routine is the only thing holding everything together.
American DecayThe Last Beekeeper
Ruth Okafor hasn't seen a bee in eleven years. When one lands on her kitchen window one September morning, she follows it into the hills and discovers something she thought was gone forever.
American DecayThe Bridge Troll’s Retirement
After six hundred years guarding Millstone Bridge, Groth's body is falling apart. When the county decides to replace his bridge with concrete, the old troll has to figure out what comes next.
American DecayWhen Atlantis Drowned Again
A graduate student finds Atlantis off the coast of Sardinia and discovers stone tablets inside — an 8,000-year-old mathematical warning about rising seas, sealed in a vault by people who knew they were drowning.
American DecayThe Cab Driver of Oz
A cab driver from Queens gets dropped into Oz by a tornado and spends three years driving a Toyota Camry on the Yellow Brick Road, discovering that fairy tales have terrible infrastructure.
American DecayThe Ballad of Route 66
When her van breaks down in Delmore, Oklahoma — population 43 — a travel writer discovers the last original town on Route 66 and the people who refused to leave when America moved on.