aghostofachance

"Bones and All" is like a love letter scribbled on butcher paper. Luca Guadagnino steers "a road movie" through the backroads of 1980s America and finds a haunting metaphor for outsiderhood: the idea that being an other can be both an identity crisis and a curse. The film asks whether the parts of ourselves we fear most can ever be lived with-let alone loved. It's all about self-acceptance with a dark metaphor, with the fact that werewolf and vampire POVs have already been tested more than enough in Hollywood so many times, this one is creating its own new monster category called "eaters".

Taylor Russell is the film's quiet engine. As Maren, she builds a character out of hesitations and sidelong glances, letting vulnerability do the heavy lifting. It's one of those rare performances where curiosity reads as courage. I do hope she gets to better places in acting. Timothée Chalamet, asLee, all errant grace and brittle warmth, meets her on the same frequency; their chemistry feels discovered rather than performed, like two radios catching the same lonely station. And then there's Mark Rylance's character Sully, who turns gentility into something creepy, skin-crawling. All I can say, he was perfectly cast for this role.

Guadagnino's direction is sensorial without showboating: sun-bleached fields, motel carpets, and county-fair lights create a soft Americana that makes the film's darker currents feel eerily intimate and believable. The score hums like a lullaby with a bruise. If the pacing occasionally lingers, it's in service of atmosphere-letting moments breathe until you hear what they're whispering. It's a slowburn movie, which I believe why some people disliked it other than displaying the cannibalistic tendencies.

What elevates the movie isn't shock element; it's empathy. "Bones and All" reframes monstrosity as a question of belonging, suggesting that love isn't the cure for our hungers but the only honest way to carry them. Uneasy, romantic, and strangely humane, it sticks to you-like a secret you're not sure you should keep. I enjoyed it and definitely recommend it for those who like "gory horror romance" type of movies.

If the original "American Psycho" was a razor-sharp satire with style and menace, which is not so much (!), its unneeded sequel is the exact opposite: a cheap, straight-to-video-feeling mess that never should have been made(!) The film is riddled with all the hallmarks of a bad B-movie: wooden acting, painfully forced low IQ dialogue, and paper-thin caricatured characters. Mila Kunis, who has proven her talent in her other roles, is definitely miscast here, and the direction gives her nothing to work with. She looks painfully bored for the entire movie. This can only be one of her few worse movies. William Shatner's appearance feels more like a parody cameo than a performance, further undermining any chance of seriousness. Only if he is chosen for the character stereotype (the flirtatious old professor), because otherwise, I don't understand why he is even in this movie. Oh, sure, for the money, like Kunis.

Plot holes abound-characters behave in ways that make no sense, motivations are too simple, and the connection to the original film is flimsy at best. It's as if the "American Psycho" name was slapped on just to sell tickets for this one, with no real effort to continue or respect the source material. (RIP Patrick Bateman!)

The soundtrack is the final insult: an absurd western style music that undercuts rather than enhances the mood, making already awkward scenes even harder to take seriously. If you watched the first one, you already know that soundtrack was one of the strongest elements of the original. In this one, it's a joke... This movie is a pointless sequel that strips away everything that made the first film memorable for some. Cheap, poorly acted, and incoherent. If you liked the first, better stay right there (and away) from this one.

Despite its cult reputation, "American Psycho" ultimately left me disappointed. I recently watched it again after more than 20 years and my thoughts haven't changed much. While Christian Bale, as a brilliant actor, gives a committed and often chilling performance as Patrick Bateman, displaying the character's inner turmoil with top notch acting. In the meantime, the rest of the film feels uneven and hollow. The satire of Wall Street greed and consumer culture is clear, but it's delivered with such heavy-handedness that it loses subtlety and impact.

The pacing is another issue-long stretches feel repetitive, dwelling too much on Bateman's routines and monologues without building meaningful tension. Supporting characters are underdeveloped and interchangeable, which may be intentional to underline the themes of shallow identity, but it makes the film emotionally flat. The violence, while shocking, often feels redundant rather than meaningful.

Visually, the slick 1980's aesthetic is well captured, the soundtrack is great, but the film struggles to balance horror and satire I think. Instead of blending the two seamlessly, it swings awkwardly between them, leaving neither particularly effective. By the end, the ambiguity about what is real versus imagined feels less like clever mystery and more like a lack of narrative payoff. You can still enjoy the movie for the acting though if you can only believe in the absurdity and inconsistencies of the plot.