Blink Twice

Channing Tatum with Polaroid camera

Men are scumbags and tech bro’s the scumbaggiest of them all. Blink Twice isn’t exactly making the most out-there statement for 2024, but in her directorial debut (she also co-wrote) Zoë Kravitz shows she knows her way around a horror movie, can build mood and tension and get performances out of her stars which are genre-familiar and yet fresh. Kravitz’s current partner, Channing Tatum, is particularly excellent as Slater King, a performative billionaire – think Musk rather than Bezos – who, as the film opens, is apologising with all his heart in an address to the world. He’s sorry for something. Penitent, pleading, he insists he’s learned from whatever he’s done, is now … Read more

Red Rocket

Strawberry and Mikey on a fairground ride

Red Rocket is the latest news bulletin from Scuzzville USA by Sean Baker, who gave us bitching transexual sex workers in Tangerine (the one “shot on an iPhone”) and the travails of motel-dwelling poor white trash in The Florida Project. Both of those flirted with poverty porn and so does Red Rocket, more literally this time with the story of busted porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), who returns to his Texas hometown to re-ingratiate himself with his his estranged wife Lexi, who lives with her mother in however you designate a dwelling that’s one up from a trailer. Constant background noise, or something big and ugly hovering at the edge of the … Read more