Costume on The CineBlog

Angel and the Badman: A West Without Dust

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I will talk mostly about the dirt, because the two critics I trust on this film arrived at the same place from different doors, and the place is clean. Julio Quintana’s Angel and the Badman, a remake of the 1947 Western that John Wayne produced for himself and James Edward Grant wrote and directed, went wide through Angel Studios on October 9 and had taken about $3.6 million by the middle of the month, against notices that Wikipedia, with its usual tact, summarizes as negative. Roger Moore’s complaint is the one a working crew will recognize instantly: everything in the frame looks tidy, freshly laundered and pressed. The house is newly painted, the barn looks new, the plow Penny hitches still has, in his joke, the showroom price tag on it. Scott Renshaw does not mention the paint; he finds the story a slog and the lead unconvincing from the first scene. Both are describing the same failure, and it is a failure of texture before it is one of casting.

Hot Spot: The Future, Secondhand

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The most honest thing in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s Hot Spot is its real estate. Variety’s reviewer, no admirer of the film’s plotting, still surrendered to what the production design is doing: Anna Anosowicz builds humanity’s last compound out of existing midcentury brutalist architecture and far older ruins, Greek stones included, dressed with what the review calls superficially futuristic window-dressing. The future, in other words, is not built here; it is scavenged. Not a brave new world but a thriftily recycled one, hanging onto past glories by a thread, and that single design decision tells you more about a civilization run by a rationing AI than any title card could. It is also, en passant, the oldest trick of resourceful production: when you cannot afford to build the future, photograph the past strangely enough and the audience will do the rest. Smoczyńska is working with the biggest budget of her career, and she spends it like a director who remembers not having one.

The Outer Threat: Signals, Not Saucers

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are two kinds of first-contact film. The first kind lands the hardware: saucers over cities, armies in the streets, a planet’s worth of extras looking up. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is this year’s grand version of it, and Wells’s Martians were doing it on the page in the nineteenth century. The second kind never shows you the visitor at all. It gives you a signal, an instrument, and a person who has to decide what the data means; Contact is its cathedral, and Clara and Ad Astra keep smaller chapels. The Outer Threat, the directing debut of the Toronto writer William Woods, belongs entirely to the second kind, and the interesting thing about it is not that a low-budget Canadian production chose the cheaper church. It is how far the film commits to the choice once made.