Underwater wishes it were Alien. Its inability to shake that aspiration undercuts its own very, very modest charms in favor of chasing a standard the attainment of which is, by th...
2020-01-10 07:56:26 +0000 UTC View Post
“Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?” says Wild Bill Hickock to his friend Charlie Utter. Actor Keith Carradine, who played Hicock in the first few episodes of David Milch’s Dead...
2020-01-04 04:13:09 +0000 UTC View Post
There is exactly one interesting shot in David O. Russell’s The Fighter. In it, Mark Wahlberg’s emotionally stunted mama’s boy character speaks to his mother over a corded landline, ...
2019-12-28 21:31:17 +0000 UTC View Post
So there it is. Everyone’s ancestry is established, two extremely chaste kisses have been had, and Disney’s new Star Wars trilogy is over. What was the point of it? I’m not sure anyone involv...
2019-12-21 06:45:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Ideally, a metaphor captures a scenario or concept and reinterprets it in visual and narrative language which provides a fresh perspective on that source. Think of the titular creature in Alien...
2019-12-20 19:44:38 +0000 UTC View Post
At the center of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is a spirit of social satire, a willingness to jab not just at sociopathic alt-right teens but at complacently liberal adults and the insular, ...
2019-12-17 18:25:13 +0000 UTC View PostI'm happy to announce that as of tonight Dreadnought's finished draft is sitting in my work folder! Once Tom Horstmann gets the cover ready to go you'll be able to buy a PDF from me on Gum...
2019-12-08 06:55:09 +0000 UTC View Post
“What if, as the elements of a horror film unfolded, we pointed at them and made excited noises?” sounds more like the backbone of a really lazy episode of MST3K than a credible premise for thi...
2019-12-06 22:25:11 +0000 UTC View Post
I love Martin Scorsese. Casino is one of the best films ever made; I’m dying to watch The Irishman; no one is better than Marty at using voice-over to add to a scene ...
2019-11-30 17:52:19 +0000 UTC View Post
MANHUNT
Gretchen Felker-Martin
Chapter I: XX
Fran watched the man stoop to drink through her scratched binoculars, squinting in the early afternoon glare. The forest po...
2019-11-27 23:45:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Duncan Jones’ Source Code is the kind of film they screen on the bus. It has a score interchangeable with the soundtrack of any gray-blue action movie released in the last fifteen years,...
2019-11-23 15:43:00 +0000 UTC View PostHey gang, the bad news is that I haven't had time to finish this month's chapter of Valkyrie. The good news is that I do have a fun piece of shlocky gore to share with you and tha...
2019-11-22 19:18:36 +0000 UTC View Post
The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams' love letter to 1977's A New Hope, clips along pretty well. It has a few thrilling, joyful scenes. The leads are tremendously charming. Beyond that...
2019-11-15 18:01:10 +0000 UTC View Post
You remember when God of War III had just come out on the PS3 and it opened with that super long cinematic where Kratos and the Titans attack Olympus? Imagine if that were an entire movie....
2019-11-08 19:10:59 +0000 UTC View Post
The Witch, director Robert Eggers' debut film, took the time to depict something complex and beautiful before slowly prizing it open and wolfing down its innards. His sophomore followup, <...
2019-11-07 03:38:15 +0000 UTC View Post
$22,536,782,220. The collective net of all 26 Marvel Cinematic Universe films outstrips an entire year's gross domestic product of the country of Belize by a considerable margin even before merchan...
2019-11-05 19:11:30 +0000 UTC View Post“Please,” Elaine whimpered. “Please don’t make me go.”
“You’re the pilot on duty,” Hatcher said wearily. She stood at the bedside behind Elaine’s back. The major’s voice w...
2019-11-02 22:25:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Lisa Hanawalt's gorgeously idiosyncratic world of loose-limbed people and anthropomorphic animal weirdos, Kristin Schaal's whining, matter-of-factly self-destructive voice performance as washed-up ...
2019-11-01 14:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Is there a blander movie than Paranormal Activity? Are there more generic-looking people than Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat? There's nothing remotely personal about this movie, none of...
2019-10-25 22:43:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Permeable barriers hold a special horror for us. They render the line between the known and the unknown tangible while also obscuring what lies beneath them, leaving to our imaginations the task of...
2019-10-24 19:09:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Cannibalism is a psychologically potent act, a kind of ultimate violation of human social values in which the victim's basic humanity is either denied or disregarded. The meaning of the act, though...
2019-10-24 02:14:30 +0000 UTC View Post
We all experience dysfunction. Abuse. Addiction. Mental illness. Exposure to a parent's aberrant behavior. None of us makes it through life without being touched by some or all of these things. For...
2019-10-22 14:37:55 +0000 UTC View Post
With his 1981 film Possession, Polish director Andrzej Żuławski took the most commonplace domestic imagery imaginable and dragged it screaming into a mindless, convulsing place of grunti...
2019-10-21 14:08:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Batman Begins starts with the self-assured assumption that Batman is extremely serious. From there it proceeds to establish a strictly business version of the caped crusader, one trained b...
2019-10-18 15:48:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Robert Wise's 1963 movie The Haunting, based on author Shirley Jackson's famous horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, is a great gnarled tree growing from the seed of a lonely ...
2019-10-18 14:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Women have been the horror genre's subject of choice for centuries. The titular purring lesbian vampire of Joseph Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla, the hunted and ignored sorority girls of Bob ...
2019-10-17 16:58:33 +0000 UTC View Post
By its nature horror most interface with subversive acts and ideas. The genre has a long history of casting queer characters as monsters and murderers, from Psycho's Norman Bates donning h...
2019-10-16 14:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
There is no grosser, more decadently rancid movie than Bram Stoker's Dracula, a rock-solid late career classic from The Conversation director Francis Ford Coppola. It's a movie in...
2019-10-15 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
As a society so much of our collective anxiety focuses on the next generation. This anxiety takes many forms, ranging from agita about media habits (“Times are bad," said Cicero somewhere around ...
2019-10-14 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Wes Anderson has always reminded me of a morlock. He's this pallid, kind of anemic figure hunched beneath a placid little fairytale world and laboring to keep it turning for the amusement of an ign...
2019-10-11 21:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post