Michael Douglas’ erotic thriller roles tangibly combined his loathsome attributes with a recognizable fallibility.
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This month, Veronica & Chad sit down with special guest Travis Woods—erotic thriller aficionado and the driving force behind our Erotic Thrillers issue—to talk through a film he and Veronica consider one of the “icons of the genre,” the 1993 Sharon Stone/William Baldwin film, Sliver. Subscribe:...
The most erotic scene I’ve ever witnessed in a television show takes place in the Reptile House of the Bronx Zoo.
American Gigolo helped create and define Richard Gere as an actor with uniquely chameleon sex appeal. But how?
Piccadilly is an erotic thriller before such terms existed to define it, a film about an eroticism it’s unable to depict.
Money. Power. Add in sex and the entire worldview of Jade can be summed up in a one-dimensional pyramid: Nothing less and, meaningfully, nothing more.
In Crash, sex on-screen becomes just another means of emotional dislocation and of situating the viewer in the emptiness of the present.
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Featured Essays
My Neighbor Totoro is a children’s film for the world as it is, and for the world as it should be.
More than any other Alien movie, David Fincher's Alien 3 is aware of Ripley’s existence as a woman, and the unique and universal horrors that come with the territory of inhabiting a woman’s body.
Two years into my struggle with mental illness, I discovered The Virgin Suicides. While a team of psychiatrists struggled to diagnose me, and my school struggled to teach me, a movie was helping me make sense of my mind.
"The thing Moonstruck lets you walk away feeling is: who cares. You find your person and then you figure it out."
Uncut Gems is itself an uncut gem—jagged and terrifying on the outside, yet encompassing a startlingly beautiful and cosmic humanism within.
The Empire Strikes Back is about doing the work after all passion for that work is gone, about the slow, hard attempts to see a long-term plan through with no hope of success in sight.
With Southland Tales, Richard Kelly asked audiences to deal with the bleakest aspects of their current reality via a tonally ambiguous, hyper-taxing, incomplete narrative. When you look at it that way, even its sub-half-million box office take might sound high.
Toshiro Mifune excelled at playing characters railing against the plan life seems to have for them.
With Southland Tales, Richard Kelly asked audiences to deal with the bleakest aspects of their current reality via a tonally ambiguous, hyper-taxing, incomplete narrative. When you look at it that way, even its sub-half-million box office take might sound high.
With human activity suspended in 2020, nature re-emerged.
Wake in Fright is a horror movie like no other. It is a film that seizes you by the arm—like a man in a bar who will not let you leave until you’ve had just one more drink—and then drags you, kicking and screaming, down into the ugliness inside yourself.
The principal Homeric venture of Blue Water, White Death is that there is still worth in seeing the unseen things in the world. There is still worth in testifying to the idiot spirit of human inquiry.
The Empire Strikes Back is about doing the work after all passion for that work is gone, about the slow, hard attempts to see a long-term plan through with no hope of success in sight.
Moneyball is not a baseball movie as much as it is a treatment on convictions, traditions, decisions, and how each of them have relational ramifications. Even the grandest plans have consequences.
The Devils is not your edgy-for-the-sake-of-edgy middle finger to the Church many at the time took it to be. It’s, in fact, a very religious film made by a Catholic artist trying to make sense of his own faith.
If many of Steven Spielberg’s films are marathon novels, Duel is a sonnet—it has room to play because of its formal constraints.
The core of Purple Rain lies in the psychological lives of Black men. What makes the film revolutionary, besides its sympathetic gaze, is that it positions music as a vehicle for redemption.
In more ways than one, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a movie about how your boss thinks it’s okay to die at work. Obviously it’s not the preferred outcome, but it’s a plenty acceptable one.
Crafted as though from everyday observation and fantastic dream, About Endlessness marries the magical and mercurial, the simple and surreal.
In both Play Misty for Me and The Beguiled, Eastwood finds himself at the mercy of hysterical, horned-up women scorned. Not only does he play against type as victim to some tenacious broads, but the taciturn western hero—historically smoldering yet essentially sexless—presents in both films as a total horndog.