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Articles by Chase Padusniak
Dark Night of the Scarecrow: Another for the Spooky Season
The DVD cover Source: Wikipedia Fair use for identification of work under review I don’t usually like using the word kino. Partly because I knew it from German long before it became English-language internet slang. Parly because its saturation means AI fruit videos almost certainly get called kino a million times a day.
Swimfan: Forgotten Aughts Pleasures
The film’s poster Source: Wikimedia Fair use, no free alternative available for the purpose of identification This is a recovery effort. In 2002, My Big Fat Greek Wedding hit theaters around the US. For those too young to remember, it was a sensation. Even as a child, I remember my shock when it was still on the marquis what seemed like months later. But did it open at the top of the box office? No. Swimfan did.
Other Mommy: Jump Scares for None
James Wan Source: License Other Mommy (2026) has not played for critics. It did not play for me. The others in my theater audience seemed to feel otherwise. On the way out, one man said to his female companion (whom he walked to her car before ambling into the distance): “we both agree that was AMAZING, right?” Others in the ill-attended screening seemed to agree—screeching and laughing in equal measure throughout.
Death by Hanging: From 1968 to 2026
Bertolt Brecht by Hans Tombock (1940) Source: Flickr user Adam Jones License The state of Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike has been all over the headlines. I suspect you, reader, have read about it. If you haven’t, Christa Pike is a convicted murderer on Tennessee’s death row since 1996. Her viciously abusive background makes her, short of an innocent death-row convict, the poster child for anti-death penalty activism.
Blaze: Flashes of Brilliance
Director and co-writer Ethan Hawke in 2018, when the film was released License In a slight violation of my plan to write about internet movies—a sin for which I hope I may be forgiven—I’d like to take on a musical biopic. Currently, Criterion hosts a bevy of rock biopics, perhaps in celebration of their renewed popularity these days. Among these stands Blaze (2018), an Ethan Hawke picture about outlaw musician Blaze Foley.
The Den: Paranoid Internet Activity
The Russian poster for the film Source: Wikipedia Fair Use (for identification of film at the top of the review) The Den (2013) is an amazing artifact of a time when we first realized the internet could be dangerous. I remember it well. As a child who played MMORPGs and spoke to people I shouldn’t have online, it felt like a moral panic. There was the Slenderman stabbing, that case in Canada where a child was cyberbullied and killed—both true, yes.
Screenlife: Zoom Origins
Through the Night #1 Source: Deviant Art user mistahjackson90 License Lately, I’ve been getting a kick out of revisiting early internet movies. I don’t mean 90s hacker stuff that rarely had anything to do with the online world. Those were power fantasies about a knowing few. I have in mind films like Unfriended (2014), screenlife joints that try to capture the increasingly normal nature of being online in the early 2010s. These often try to be formally experimental (and fail miserably).
Seven Up!: Up, Up, and Away
The 2019 DVD cover for the series Source: Fair use I don’t remember when I first heard about the Up series (1964-Present). I don’t even know why I would. Its British focus, long run, and interest in the nature of time, aging, and change do not seem like they would have appealed to me at age 15. But who knows? They’ve sat somewhere back there for the better part of a decade or more. Their time would come. And so, it has.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair: Short Lived New Flesh
The film’s poster Source: Wikimedia Fair Use As usual, I’m a bit behind. Only now have I made my way to a Jane Schoenbrun film. Their first directed feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) originally came out on HBO Max during the pandemic times. These days, Schoenbrun is probably better known for I Saw the TV Glow (2024); they also have Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), both of which created or are creating quite the buzz.
Millennium Actress: Hints of a Past and a Future
Satoshi Kon Source: Flickr user Aaron Webb License Recently, I wrote about Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue (1997); it’s a cult masterpiece, yaddy yadda. It’s aged like…what feels more contemporary than fine wine? Old steak? The kind with the vaguely purple skin, the yellow fat cap, and the YouTube chef gesturing? Yes, it’s aged just like that. Delicious, ready for today more than it was for the time of its creation. Kon directed four films (he wrote five and animated far more than that).
Do the Right Thing: What Can I Add?
Spike Lee Source: Wikimedia (Danny Norton) License I’m late to the party. What else is new? Spike Lee is a strange figure for someone of my age and background. Raised white, suburban, and semi-conservative, I can’t say Spike had much of a role in my upbringing. I’m not sure he came up much. But, if he did, I imagine it was much in the way Al Sharpton did. And, well, my mom isn’t around to ask anymore.
Perfect Blue: Cult Hit Meditation
Perfect Blue Source: License Perfect Blue (1997) has attained cult status. Perhaps more importantly, it is a certain kind of cult film, one that has transformed since its first release. Witness its Wikipedia page. Note the reviews, at least the English-languages ones. How many come from before 2017? Not many, not many. Why? I’m not sure any but the most intense cinephiles and anime-heads had any reason to know about it before then.
American Movie: The Beauty of the Chuds
The film’s poster Source: License American Movie (1999) makes me wistful. There are multiple sad ways to view and discuss the film. Most cynically, some see Chris Smith and Sarah Price’s documentary as exploitative. Their camera tracks the quixotic dream of would-be filmmaker, deadbeat dad, and drunk Mark Borchardt. Smith and Price have gone onto more-or-less serious careers while Borchardt and his buddy Mike Schenk have not. They sound like Fargo (1996) extra rejects. They watch the Packers.
Maddie’s Secret: Scylla and Charybdis
The film’s theatrical poster Source: Wikimedia Fair use Maddie’s Secret (2025) announces something well know but few say: “woke is dead; long live woke!” What I mean is that the political environment has changed markedly since the heyday of Democrats in kente cloth and carefully balanced representational Netflix slop. As annoying as some of the more cynical aspects of “high woke” were, however, it’s hard not to miss some of it in this moment of vicious repression.
The King of Comedy: Scorsese, Scorsese, Where Art Thou?
You know him; you love him Source: License Rupert Pupkin. What a perfect name for a fame-obsessed stalker and everyman. “Rupert” has a proper, almost British air. It’s the name of a prince or an old man who spends all day sucking black licorice cough drops. And “Pupkin”? Both “pup” and “kin” mark something as diminutive, as small. Rupert Pupkin is a tiny, pathetic aristocrat, a bleating fool in a pompous suit. His suit, in particular, is powder blue.
Love Streams: What Film is For
John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands Source: Flickr user Jon Rubin License In a TV documentary about the production of Love Streams (1984), writer-director John Cassavetes says most movies bore him. He has, he confesses, no interest in entertainment, in being pacified. A one-off about “pizzazz” and “adding more to keep the audience interested” briefly turned my mind to “second-screen writing” now so common for streaming services. Cassavetes would hate what film has become (and hated what it was then).
Drunken Angel: In the Shadow of the A-Bomb
The film’s poster. Source: Wikimedia Fair Use Akira Kurosawa is best known for his historical epics and Shakespeare adaptations, less so for his portraits of death and destruction in the aftermath of World War II. If you’ve seen Red Beard (1965), the subject matter of Drunken Angel (1948) will not surprise you. Helping people ain’t easy. Here, Kurosawa concerns himself with an alcoholic doctor making do in the ruins of shattered Tokyo.
Thunderball: Hide the Nukes!
Thunderball Source: Flickr user James Vaughan License Thunderball (1965) is bloated. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s overlong, has unnecessary (and perplexing) sexual assault sequences, and gets a bit sloppy with its menagerie of characters. Still, I think it’s quite good. I bother saying that because I took a beating, both online and in real life, for saying I thought From Russia with Love (1963) is the worst of the first three Bond films.
A Soldier’s Prayer: All Good Things
The film’s poster. Source: Fair use And so, we have the third entry in The Human Condition trilogy (1959-1961). This is, by far, the most soul crushing entry, because it looks at the effects of war straight on. It benefits, I think, from not sensationalizing. Not that bravery and horror are foreign to war (they absolutely are not). But the grim reality is that war and its aftermath are grinding and harsh, rooted in unsexy facts like famine, disease, isolation, and fear.
Road to Eternity: War, Endless War
The film’s poster Source: Wikimedia Fair use I continue to make my way through Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth The Human Condition trilogy (1959-1961), based on the as-yet-untranslated novel by Junpei Gomikawa. Here, I will focus on the second part, which brings us to a theme we human beings seem never to learn about: war. In the first film, Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) worked as mining labor supervisor in Manchuria, navigating endless ethical dilemmas to avoid being drafted.
200 Cigarettes: Why Bother?
Paul Rudd Source: Wikimedia user Arturo Pardavila III License 200 Cigarettes (1999) taught me a very important lesson. If a movie’s cast lists more than five actors you know well, but you’ve never seen the movie, it’s probably dreck. Case in point: 200 Cigarettes boasts Dave Chapelle, Paul Rudd, Courtney Love, Elvis Costello, Christina Ricci, Janeane Garofalo, and Kate Hudson. Some of that manage to be a little funny, especially Chapelle.
No Greater Love: That’s Life
Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) Source: Flickr (License in Link) I love rediscovering a movie after a decade. The young cinephile seeks all out and takes nothing in. Or at least that was the case with me. As a result, I always find the most enjoyment in returning to those famous films that simply washed over me. Sometimes, we just aren’t old enough to appreciate the best stuff. Enter The Human Condition (1959-1961), which I watched over the course of a snowy day or two almost a decade ago.
Goldfinger: Bond, Finally Bond
Japanese cover of a release of the Goldfinger theme. Source: Flicker user Johan Oomen License It’s silly for me to admit this, but it feels somehow important. I grew up on the Austin Powers films (1997-2002). While I watched some of the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig Bond movies and games growing up, I’d never seen a full Sean Connery joint. That changed recently thanks to Criterion Channel’s featuring the first three such movies.
Backrooms: The Kids Do Silent Cinema
The original Backrooms photo, posted in 2019 Source: No Copyright Going to see Backrooms (2026), I had an almost unheard-of theatrical experience. Completely surrounded by teenagers, one of whom spent the previews talking about how the only vegetable she’s ever eaten was a potato, my wife and I were not sure what to expect. We do not follow the online video series or the Roblox game on which the film is based.
Obsession: Incel Nightmare
Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions Source: Wikimedia user Frank Schulenberg License Blumhouse has not hit much lately. Obsession (2025) breaks that losing streak. Writer-director Curry Baker offers audience the rare gimmick horror picture that works both as a film and a (perhaps unconscious) social commentary. The plot is simple enough to allow franchising.
Häxan: The Never-Ending Witch Hunt
Häxan (1992) Source: Picryl Public Domain Benjamin Christiansen’s Häxan (1992) is one of those movies any filmhead knows they should watch. The stills one sees online are stunning. Horrific-looking monsters stand over cauldrons. Satan himself wags his tongue at God knows what. And it’s all so clear, crisper than what we get on the silver screen today. But, then again, it’s a 100-minute silent film with a quasi-documentary tone. Think The Thin Blue Line (1988) with no talking and guys in demon suits.
¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!: Gen-X Sends Its Best
Casa Bonita Source: Flickr user Wally Gobetz License I’ve been a fan of South Park (1997-Present) since I was little older than the characters in the show. Anyone who grew up on the series remembers 2003’s episode about Casa Bonita, a Mexican-themed mega-Chuck E. Cheese. Cartman will go to any length to make sure he gets to go see the cliff divers, eat sopapillas, and explore Black Bart’s cove. As a kid, it seemed unreal. And yet, it is. Casa Bonita has been a fixture of the Denver area since 1974.
Remote Control: VHS Tape of the Vanities
Copyright: Vista Organization Fair use: no free alternative is readily available to identify the work; this article provides critical commentary on the film in question. Once again the Criterion Channel has nonchalantly delivered a smash hit I’d otherwise have had no hope of discovering. Ironic perhaps, given the centrality of video clerks and their recommendations to Jeff Lieberman’s Remote Control (1988). Another win for streaming’s best service, in any case.
The 4:30 Movie: Kevin Smith and the Gen X Cinephile
Kevin Smith (2008) Source: License Kevin Smtih loves New Jersey. Kevin Smith loves movies. As an Xer, he’s finally getting old enough to get wistful. And so, thirty years into his career, he’s turned back to before its advent. In The 4:30 Movie (2024), Smith dives into his own youth and his love of cinema. For all its hokeyness, I couldn’t help but smirk throughout. Smith glories in knowing jokes about the future (“Bill Cosby—nothing will ever be bad about that guy”).
Secrets & Lies in the Age of Truth Social
Mike Leigh Source: Flickr, Photo Credit Chris Payne License What makes Mike Leigh’s movies so beautiful and difficult is the way they resist easy description. If I were to tell you that his Secrets & Lies (1996) is about a young Black optometrist whose adoptive mother dies only for her to seek out her biological mother, who is a bitter, white factory worker with a lay-about daughter who sweeps streets for a living, you might look at me askance.
The Drama: Finally, a Big Swing
Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli Source: Flickr user Montclair Film License Okay, it’s a modest swing. But Kristoffer Borgli’s new romantic tragicomedy The Drama (2026) actually tries something. Triumph all ye cherubim; sing with us, ye seraphim. It even manages to do topicality without saturating itself in the slime of present outrage. And it ain’t half bad to boot. The Drama is about the drama of a specific couple, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya).
The Good Samaritan: Who Is My Neighbor?
It’s an eternal question and a timely one: who is my neighbor? Thomas Dalrymple’s The Good Samaritan (2025), now streaming on Angel, sets out to make this ancient concern legible to our modern moment. How do we relate to others? Whom should we be suspicious of? Should we be suspicious of anyone? Writer-director Dalrymple takes the terse outline of Jesus’ parable and fills in the gaps in character and personal relationships.
Project Hail Mary: Kids’ Movie?
Ryan Gosling Source: Flickr/Gage Skidmore License My journey with Project Hail Mary (2026) began when a student asked if we could read the novel on which the film is based. I said “no,” because we were in the middle of The Tempest and had Mrs. Dalloway on the horizon. But color me surprised when I didn’t stop hearing about the movie adaptation only a couple months later. And so, I watched it. The all-ages crowd loved it. Laughs, tears—you name it.
Happiness: Normal Monsters, Monsters Normal
Todd Solondz Source: License Todd Solondz’ Happiness (1998) has a reputation. It’s bleak. It’s iconoclastic. It’s perverted. It’s simply “too much.” I couldn’t disagree more. As always, Solondz is offbeat. Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, plays a heavy-breathing phone harasser who sticks things to his bedroom wall with the results of his telephonic adventures. There are sex offenders, sundae-eating murderers, and Russian cabby sex pests. Dads buy magazines for kids for themselves.
Undertone: Scary, Scary Sound
Source and License I finally got back to the theater this week and caught undertone (2025), a Canadian horror film with only two actors on screen. Several others, however, appear as disembodied voices. That’s the shtick here: can you do horror with just sound? Yes and no. Movies like The Haunting (1963) long ago demonstrated that things that go bump in the night could terrify audiences. The trouble is that the scares mean little without an enticing plot.
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Quiet Scorsese
Martin Scorsese Source: Flickr user Tyler Durdan License Forgive the brevity of this one—my friend and podcast co-host Sam has been visiting for a couple days. Lots of fun means exhaustion on the other side. I did, however, recently get a chance to watch Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). This is not mobster Scorsese, nor is it even him at work in New York or its suburbs. Alice is more like Wanda (1970) or A Woman Under the Influence (1974).
Killer Of Sheep: Realism Amidst The Rubble
Charles Burnett Source: Wikimedia License I’m a little late for Black History Month, but it’s never a bad time to watch or write about Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978). I mention Black History Month, because Burnett’s MFA thesis turned first feature is sometimes billed as a neorealistic response to Blaxploitation: Black Americans in the late 70s living as they actually did. On that front, Burnett’s film succeeds.
La Jetée: Montage, Past And Future
A watermarked still from La Jetée (1962) Source: Flickr user Pascal Rey License What more can be said of Chris Marker’s groundbreaking “photo-novel,” La Jetée (1962)? Its subject matter, concerning a man experimentally sent into the past and future after World War III, influenced William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk. Its heartrate-raising editing inspired Terry Gilliam. David Bowie references it in a music video.
All I Desire: Midwestern Sirk
Barbara Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld girl. Source: Flickr user trialsanderrors Public Domain Douglas Sirk has been called both the king of the 50s “women’s weepies” and a master of social commentary. The two, in fact, go together. Or at least did in his case. As a fan of R.W. Fassbinder and Todd Haynes, Sirk’s greatest heirs, I’ve made it my mission to explore his lush, technicolor oeuvre. The time has come to plunge into his earlier Hollywood work—the black-and-white melodramas.
The Adjuster: Superhero For The End Of History
Atom Egoyan and Arsinée Khanjian. Source: Flickr user PAN Photo License The poster for Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster (1991) does and does not suggest pulpiness. Elias Koteas stands perpendicular to the frame, drawing taut an arrow, prepared to let it fly out the window of his suburban home. A woman’s legs jut forth from near the viewer’s vantage point. Koteas wears just a towel wrapped around his waist.
EXistenZ: Another Day In 2026
David Cronenberg Source: License Another week, another Cronenberg. This time we have his Y2K dive into the wonderful world of video games. Of course, he does it in his way: people play games with fleshy controllers connected to them via “bioports” embedded in their spines. But, as usual, he trains his eye on the fundamentally human, the tangible—in a word, the real.
Atlantic City: The French On The Shore
On the set of Atlantic City Source: License I am from New Jersey. This is no secret. I love seeking out movies by our filmmakers, but perhaps the most intriguing is when someone from elsewhere (rather rarely) decides to represent the Garden State. How, then, could I avoid Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980)? A Frenchman takes on the Shore? With Burt Lancaster? Sign me up. As a sign near the building where our main characters live announces: “Atlantic City, you’re back.
Maps To The Stars: Hollywood Babylon
David Cronenberg License David Cronenberg is a treasure. I’m not breaking any new ground there, but I had the pleasure of watching his (criminally underrated) Maps to the Stars (2014), his Mulholland Drive (2001), if you will. Lynch and Cronenberg, whatever some may say, don’t have all that much in common, of course. Maps to the Stars is not about (not precisely anyway) a young woman chasing her dreams in Hollywood.
Family Viewing: Grain And Fuzz
Atom Egoyan and his wife Arsinée Khanjian. Source: Wikimedia user Richard Burdett License If you’ve seen an Atom Egoyan movie, you know he likes to watch. Or, better put, he likes to show us how we watch. His films are filled with two-way mirrors, camcorders, and screens. Usually, voyeurism features, to use a strong word, as a perversion in Egoyan’s films. Not always and not unambiguously. But to be obsessed with watching is to lose one’s grip on reality, or at least the things that matter.
54: Let The Good Times Roll
Studio 54, after its heyday. Source: License A new year, an older movie—1998’s 54, the tale of one 19-year-old’s whirlwind experience at the mythical Studio 54.
In The Mood For Love: Not In The Mood
Among the film’s stirring visuals. Source: Flickr user Shin’ichi Iwamoto License Well, let me sin. Not boldly but of necessity. Of course, the sin is not, per se, the mood In the Mood for Love (2000) put me in; rather, it’s in the sharing. But I’ll take the risk. The year ends in a few hours and that, I think, betokens boldness.
Yi Yi: Simply Having A Melancholic Christmas Time
Taipei, where most of Yi Yi takes place. Source: Wikimedia user License Confiteor: Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000) stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the great canon of films I’ve put off. At nearly three hours and promising to trace generations of family history, the movie daunts. Can daunt be used intransitively? I’m not sure. But I am sure Yi Yi daunted. Wim Wenders’ films have the same effect on me. Sometimes fear wins. Though—and this is the message of Christmas, isn’t it?—not forever.
The Bishop’s Wife: Cary Does Christmas
The film’s poster Source: Picryl Public Domain Along with the half the Eastern Seaboard, I’ve been incredibly sick the last week or so. What better to do than watch a bunch of movies? Grade papers, of course. But when done with papers? Well, fall asleep. When not sleeping? Uh, walk the dogs in the snow. But—after that: watch 1947’s The Bishop’s Wife.
Poison: Nascent Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes, 2017 Source: License I love Todd Haynes, or at least his films. He and I share a love of Fassbinder and Sirk. He’s turned that into a career. I have Letterboxd. But tut tut to our differences, I’d like to talk about what brings us together: humanity. Not the concept, no. Not even the anthropological reality of sharing a species.
Crossfire: Works Progress Cinema
Gloria Grahame in Crossfire (1947) Source: Store Norske Leksikon Public Domain Busy week and brief write-up. Over on the Criterion Channel, I glimpsed a Robert Mitchum noir, Crossfire (1947), that gave me more than I bargained for. I just wanted to watch Mitchum do his thing. Lurid late-40s shadows and a gritty story appeared as two (semi-expected) pluses. But Crossfire offers more than typical noir fare. We remember these films for their post-war cynicism.
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