The Iron Claw
Story Stream
Holt McCallany Saw His Own Father in 'The Iron Claw' February 14, 2024
For nearly his entire four-decade career, Holt McCallany has been playing guys you don’t want to cross. His physicality plays into this — his height is imposing and his broad solidity suggests an obstacle; he’s played U.S. marshals, assassins, and a ...
Real Men Sob in Spandex January 16, 2024
A stigma still looms over men weeping on screen. Tears are associated with weakness, crying something “little girls” do, vulnerability only hinted at rather than expressed freely. The Iron Claw is looking to crack open these outdated notions. In this...
The Curse of 'The Iron Claw' January 11, 2024
Four decades ago, the American director Robert Aldrich made the most cheerful, companionable, and charitable movie ever produced about professional wrestling. Against all expectations, Aldrich—the grand master of the grotesque on the basis of such ca...
'The Iron Claw' Doesn’t Quite Take Hold January 08, 2024
Given a long enough timeline, everybody of note winds up redeemed. So it goes with Texas’ star-crossed Von Erich family of wrestlers, which serves as the “inspiration” for director Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, a gorgeously-shot film that aims for epi...
‘The Iron Claw’ and the Dallas Only the Dead Know December 25, 2023
You cannot visit the Sportatorium. The Whisky a Go Go of 1980’s professional wrestling, Dallas’s crucible of scripted violence and shirtless melodrama, where fans full of this-is-real-to-me fervor once climbed down from the wooden bleachers to start ...
“The Iron Claw” Is a Combustible Family Drama December 22, 2023
Sean Durkin’s first two features, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “The Nest,” have a manner that I’d describe as apologetic realism: there’s something he’s bursting to say, but he forces it into the confines of tightly crafted dramas. Those films have...
