What’s cool about werewolf films by my reckoning is their flexibility. They can be metaphors for sexual wakening, stories about coming into adulthood, whodunits or nothing more than a person changing to a beast. Vikingulven (or Viking Wolf) is the latter, which is to say that it appears to be saying nothing more than what […]
I’m not typically a fan of movies that depict characters that do things as the result of some vaguely defined mental illness because they’re often entirely geared toward sensationalism. And while such misinterpretations are the fuel that power most horror movies, sometimes they at least attempt something approaching reality. Which is what impresses me about […]
I really wanted to love Josh Rubin’s Werewolves Within – because ‘werewolves’ – and I just didn’t. Which isn’t to say that I hated it, but it leans hard into the humor, which I wouldn’t mind quite so much if it worked (even almost) as diligently at the horror. The movie revolves around a Ranger, […]
I don’t know where the Rian Johnson went who directed Brick (2005) and Looper (2012), but I don’t recognize the Rian Johnson who directed Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017) and Knives Out (2019) By my reckoning the latter movies don’t respect either Star Wars or the works of Agatha Christie, which […]
Scott Cooper is a director who tends to take on fairly heavy subjects in movies like Into The Furnace (2013), Hostiles (2017), Antlers (2021) and most recently The Pale Blue Eye (2022). And having only the latter two movies; it there’s anything to be taken away from the experience is that Scott Cooper makes serious […]
David Bruckner’s The Night House is supposedly the movie that led David Goyer to choose him to direct Hulu’s Hellraiser reboot, which is really interesting because there’s little about that movie that would make him a good choice for that role. Brucker is very methodical and measured in how he approaches his projects and typically […]
James Gunn is one of those directors that I feel does better when he’s forced to innovate, which is typically the case when someone doesn’t have access to resources and is forced to make do. That is no longer the case, especially after the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies though what The […]
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the first movie in a long time that I’ve seen twice in theaters. The reason I did so had a lot to do with the performance of Tenoch Huerta (Namor) and the depiction of the people of Telokan. It made me feel a sense of pride in Namor and what […]
Zach Cregger’s Barbarian isn’t the scariest movie you’ll ever see – despite the commercial promoting the movie strongly implying exactly that – though it’s a shockingly good horror movie. And what’s particularly interesting is that Cregger wrote as well as directed, and the movie is surprisingly layered (by which I mean there’s more to it […]
Neil Marshall by my reckoning has never been a particularly innovative director though he’s always managed to take a familiar subject and make it feel somewhat novel. The first time I noticed this tendency was with Doomsday, which I enjoyed but bit also seemed to be mimicking George Miller; not so much that it wasn’t […]
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