Alessio Ligouri’s Shortcut is a movie that you don’t see often enough, namely a simple story told well (and at times evocative of Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me – you might have noticed that I didn’t say ‘Stephen King’s Stand by Me‘ because while he may have written The Body, the short story the movie […]
There’re times Nikita’s Argunov’s Koma is a gorgeous movie to look at and the worlds depicted on screen are rendered in a beautiful, almost painterly fashion. Though there are also a few scenes – luckily few – that fall quickly into the uncanny valley, where you can sort of see that there’re more than a […]
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS (MILD THOUGH THEY MAY BE) FOR NETFLIX’S BLOOD RED SKY. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE, WATCH IT AND COME BACK. The vampires of Peter Thorwarth’s Blood Red Sky by my reckoning the best type: Mean, animalistic and defined entirely by a hunger for blood. Preferably human. The movie revolves […]
I remember watching He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983-1985) as a young person, and at the time I really enjoyed it. Though it hasn’t aged particularly well. And that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with characters designed to appeal mainly to young boys, with names like Stinkor (a skunk-man), Triclops (a man […]
One of the many things that irked me about the brouhaha over Justice League (2017) was that in explanation as to why so many people were seemingly upset with his take on the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) movies his wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder said something to the effect that what upset fans of […]
I really wanted to like The Seventh Day because as someone who’s not a fan of the exorcism sub-genre I’ve been looking for a long time for a movie that managed to move beyond the typical tropes (people spinning on the ceiling, objects flying about, and so on). And it should go without saying that […]
I really liked Netflix’s Fear Street Part 1: 1994 (2021) primarily because it was designed as a trilogy from the start, a risk traditional studios don’t often make (because when you’re basing whether or not a sequel comes about on the profitability of the movie before it it’s a really dangerous – and dumb, unless […]
Part of what bothers me about the current iteration of zombie – popularized (and ruined) by Zach Snyder, which is par for the course – is that they veer from the blueprint, the Bible, written by George Romero, who proclaimed from the mount that was Night of the Living Dead (1968) that ‘Zombies don’t run, […]
I know the idea of ‘aggressive mediocrity’ is somewhat contradictory in that mediocrity is almost by definition milquetoast and lacking in passion, but there’s no other way I can find to describe James Wan’s The Conjuring 2. The original movie was one of those horror movies that was so risk-adverse that (much to no one’s […]
I was particularly impressed by Ole Bornedal’s The Possession (2012), so much so that in my review I mentioned how much I preferred it to the horror of James Wan’s movies, The Conjuring in particular. There was a problem though, namely I haven’t seen it in quite awhile, so I was comparing Bornedal’s movie to […]
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