AMERICAN FICTION

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2023 stands as perhaps the best year for satire.

"American Fiction" puts a fine point on that fact with a laugh-out-loud movie that covers a lot of satirical ground.

First time writer/director Cord Jefferson adapts Percival Everett's 2001 novel "Erasure" with snappy results.

Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a black fiction writer fed up with the state of black writers publishing books that pander to downtrodden black stereotypes.

Job and family troubles send Monk on a journey toward a new chapter of self-fulfillment and improved personal relations with friends and family.

"American Fiction" joins 2023's list of truly inspiring films that prove Cinema is far from dead despite Hollywood's worst efforts over the past 20 years.

May there never be another comic book movie, and plenty more great movies from Cord Jefferson.

Three cheers for "American Fiction."

Perfection.

Rated R. 105 mins.

POOR THINGS

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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When I met Yorgos Lanthimos at the Fox Searchlight party for his film "The Favourite," I told him that I thought that film fell short of being as bawdy as it should have been, that he needed to lean into being much bawdier with his movies. Yorgos seems to have followed my advice.

Working from a novel by Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray, and with artistic input from the film's lead actress Emma Stone, Yorgos Lanthimos presents a captivating journey of self-discovery that necessarily involves sex, lots and lots of sex.

Oh how refreshing to see characters fucking, rather than shooting each other.

"Poor Things" coincides with Emerld Fennell's "Saltburn" in confronting Hollywood's gun-happy format with something considerably more grounded, namely the sex urge that drives people, and the social curiosity that comes along with it.

Rapturous in its outrageous designs, "Poor Things" is a wonder to behold and a balm for the soul.

Emma Stone is fearless. Willem Dafoe is exquisite, as he always is. Mark Ruffalo provides the comic timing.

Brilliant social satire arrives in spades with a movie that you may want to watch a few times, for obvious reasons.

The not-so-obvious reasons are good too.

Rated R. 141 mins.

NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE — SHOCKTOBER!

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Werner Herzog's inspired homage to F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent film is an appropriately chilling telling of the Gothic tale derived from Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Klaus Kinski delivers a delightfully unhinged performance as the bloodthirsty vampire Count Dracula who takes advantage of a real estate broker (Bruno Ganz).

Naturally, the vampire has to travel in his coffin on a ship infested with plague-carrying rats.

Herzog plays with surrealistic compositions that are truly terrifying.

Plague carrying rats are a thematic symbol in this twisted tale of horror.

Isabelle Adjani brings her immutable beauty to bear as the broker's fearful wife, fated to suffer Dracula’s blood-hungry bite.

"Nosferatu" is filled with delightfully scary touches and recreated camera angles from Murnau's original that add a historic context to this masterpiece of horror from one of the New German Cinema's most prolific and enduring members.

Rated PG. 107 mins.