Miss Hokusai is not shy about the mystical. Paintings come alive to tell stories of hell and suffering and drives a woman insane. A geisha’s ghost has to be trapped in a net during the night in order to keep it from flying away. Our protagonist O-Ei paints a dragon, not from her own imagination, […]
Last Girl Standing Fails to Deliver on Its Promising Premise
What happens when the credits roll on a horror movie? What happens to the “final girl” after she’s spent a night in the woods being chased by a serial killer who murdered all of her friends? These are the questions asked by writer-director Benjamin R. Moody in Last Girl Standing. Unfortunately, Moody’s answer to what […]
King Cobra is an Enthralling Examination of the Gay Porn Industry
A decent number of films exploring the drama of the porn industry have followed in the wake of Boogie Nights, but few of them have matched Paul Thomas Anderson’s knack for highlighting the absurdity and monotony of the industry. Most of the post-Boogie Nights films have either honed in on the natural titilation of the subject […]
Jack Goes Home is a Thrilling Work by a Bold New Director
Thomas Dekker’s impressive psychological thriller Jack Goes Home is the latest in a new wave of American horror films that get much of their tension from questioning the reliability of their protagonist’s view. Like Jacob’s Ladder before it, Jack Goes Home is an exploration of trauma that utilizes horror tropes and imagery to bring viewers closer to its protagonist’s headspace. But Jack […]
Dystopic Homesick Blues: Idiocracy
Because the world is always a mess, we’ve decided to look back at some of our favorite dystopic works and examine why they remain so potent no matter how many years have passed between their creation and now. Usually when we think of dystopias, there’s a certain level of antagonistic intelligence involved. Governments turn on […]
Coming Out is Human and Relatable
When asked to concoct a mental image of what happens when a queer or transgender person comes out of the closet, the picture tends to be somewhat harrowing: crying and gnashing of teeth, breaking of familial bonds, bold assertions of a brand new self. Sometimes this is the case, but sometimes it can also simply […]
Danny Says is a Heartfelt Attempt to Shine a Light on a Rock Pioneer
Like most collaborative art forms, music is a medium that focuses on stars at the expense of the lesser known figures who help those stars get to where they are. Sometimes behind-the-scenes figures become larger than life themselves (Phil Spector and Suge Knight are two examples who likely immediately come to mind for the wrong reasons) […]
Miss Stevens is a Film About Loneliness That Forgets it’s About Loneliness
About an hour into Miss Stevens, two characters touch each other. This might not be a notable occurrence in other films, but in this film, this is the first time that one person touches another, in any way. The people in this film sit in cars or theaters together, have sex with one another, have […]
Last Action Cinema: Nemesis
Here at Loser City, we’re unabashed genre fans but even we recognize that action films can often be difficult to defend. Lucky for you, we’ve decided to look back at some of the best examples from the genre, analyzing what it is about these works specifically that allows them to succeed. Today, Nick Hanover delves […]
Level Up is More Than a Mushroom, Not Yet a Tanooki Suit
It’s not uncommon for a film’s best and most memorable character to be the locale in which it takes place: the sweat drenched glitz and grime of a Michael Mann cityscape, the paradise-turned-Hell of WWII Polynesia in The Thin Red Line, the looming shadows of Jean-Pierre Melville’s noir vision of Paris. So too is the […]
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