May 2024 Movie Reviews: Love Lies Bleeding, Infested, Late Night with the Devil

In today’s streaming age, there’s definitely not a shortage of movies to watch. However, it does sometimes seem like there may be a shortage of actually good films to enjoy. As we welcome the month of May, we’ll go over three recent releases, and discuss whether any of these titles are actually worthy of your movie-viewing time.

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

A24, 104 minutes

Love Lies Bleeding is a thriller-drama about a gym employee who falls for a woman new to town who’s training to be a bodybuilder. The film received really good reviews from a majority of critics despite being not actually being that well-done of a movie.

I think the fact that the love story at the center of the movie revolves around two women is the main reason for such positive reviews. Most critics tend to be more liberal and, since they support these types of movies being made, they tend to be more lenient with their critiques of such films. I think that more representation of certain groups of people who didn’t receive as much representation in film and movies in the past is great, but it’s important to acknowledge that this automatically does not make such movies good.

If anything, I would say that Love Lies Bleeding, which would certainly want to be classified as a gay feminist story about female empowerment, actually features some pretty shallow characters. We never see any depth as to why these two women care about one another. The gym manager only likes the female bodybuilder because she is physically attracted to her. A deep, well thought-out love story, this most certainly is not.

Love Lies Bleeding also has pretty nasty sensibilities to it that I don’t personally care for. It’s brutally violent and we’re following largely bad people who do bad things to other bad people. This is definitely not a “fun” film. Not every movie has to be fun, of course, but it’s not particularly realistic or anything either. So, it’s an unrealistic, not fun love story with no depth to its unlikeable characters.

Grade: 3.5/10

Infested (2023)

My Box Films/Shudder, 106 minutes

In Infested, the place becoming infested is an apartment building. The creature doing the infesting: spiders. I’ve never been a fan of those creepy eight-legged arachnids, and I also do live in an apartment building, so I’m sort of the target audience for people who might find this one scary. However, while there were a few creepy scenes that delivered (particularly in the first third of the film), Infested is largely a miss in terms of both frights and overall quality.

Calling this French horror film incredibly unrealistic is a bit of an understatement. I mean, obviously, a movie about spiders taking over an apartment building and killing its residents isn’t going to be truthful to reality. But even for a B-tier horror movie, this one is silly.

Basically, after a resident brings back a single spider that then escapes from him, it suddenly has spider babies which then multiply at a ridiculous rate. With seemingly a very short amount of time passing, we go from one spider to literally more spiders than have ever been in a location ever in history.

I actually don’t mind this silliness as much as the movie’s bad attempts at more dramatic scenes. Whenever we focus on the protagonist’s struggling relationship with his sister (since their mother is dead) or his broken friendship with one of the people who becomes trapped in the building with them, the movie goes from a five on the enjoyment scale down to about a two.

Part of me wishes they had just cut these parts from the movie and concentrated on making it more enjoyable, but then the movie would’ve been just young people running away from spiders. And that’s about 80% of what this movie already is currently. Infested isn’t awful, but it also isn’t really worth a watch for horror fans.

Grade: 4.5/10

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

IFC Films, 93 minutes

In a time when horror movies often feel like they’re basically recycling versions of the same plot over and over again, Late Night with the Devil feels original and fresh. The film is framed as a documentary that will show the tape, along with some behind-the-scenes footage, of what happened on the set of a late-night talk show in the 1970s.

The show in question is Night Owls, a program hosted by Jack Delroy, and it’s framed as a competitor to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. With his show struggling in the ratings, Delroy hopes that a big, special Halloween episode will help catapult his show to the top.

Late Night with the Devil does a fantastic job recreating the feel of a 1970s late-night talk show and David Dastmalachian, who plays Jack Delroy, is perfect as the program’s host. Dastmalachian is often cast in more supporting roles, but he shows he can definitely star as a lead here.

At only an hour and a half in length, Late Night with the Devil moves along at a good pace and is never boring. I imagine the ending of the film will be a little divisive, but I largely enjoyed the movie overall – it’s not perfect, but it’s original, spooky, and fun.

Grade: 7.5/10