Apparently, author/artist/occasional director Clive Barker awoke one gloomy morning and thought, “You know what Hellraiser was missing? A hardboiled film noir detective!” Despite the inherent absurdity of that premise, his creative instincts were absolutely correct, because that germ of an idea eventually inspired the deliriously entertaining and delightfully unconventional Lord of Illusions. The movie’s protagonist, Harry D’Amour, is the quintessential Old Hollywood gumshoe:

While I greatly enjoyed Kenji Misumi’s unconventional adaptation of Yotsuya Kaidan (which I reviewed back in 2024), I was somewhat critical of actor Kazuo Hasegawa’s revisionist interpretation of protagonist Tamiya Iemon; in its effort to emphasize the character’s sympathetic qualities, the film made him far too passive, leaving him essentially devoid of agency in his own tragic downfall. Fortunately, The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost—director Tai Kato’s bleak, gritty, cynical take on

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Relatively early on in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, protagonist Chris Hansen—portrayed by a superb Robert Pattinson as a deliciously complex tangle of contradictions—angrily denies that what he does even remotely resembles “acting.” The argument is, of course, entirely unconvincing. Consider his introductory scene, which immediately establishes his penchant for showmanship: as he prepares to confront the la

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Those seeking a “traditional” adaptation of the most iconic episode in the Orestes saga (inspired, perhaps, by the short interlude revolving around Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Nolan’s The Odyssey, as I certainly was) will probably find Electra, My Love rather disappointing. While the film borrows liberally from the versions of the Greek tragedy dramatized by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus, Hungarian

I’ve always believed that Resident Evil was particularly ill-suited to cinematic reinterpretation. While fans of Capcom’s blockbuster survival horror franchise are certainly passionate about their favorite characters and the overarching series “lore,” the actual stories of the games are rather thin on substance (with barely enough narrative meat to sustain a ten-minute short, let alone a feature), existing primarily to justify a repetitive loop of exploring creepy environment

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] On paper, the bare-bones elevator pitch for Coyote vs. Acme—“What if Wile E. Coyote sued the Acme Corporation for consistently selling him defective products?”—sounds like the premise of a rather lackluster Saturday Night Live sketch. The synopsis certainly leads one to expect the sort of insufferably snarky, tongue-in-cheek, postmodern style of genre deconstruction that today’s youth would describe as “iro

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Do not be deceived by the provocative title and misleading marketing: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is not, in fact, a deconstruction of the slasher genre. While it certainly cannibalizes some familiar tropes, conventions, and iconography—a masked killer wielding a gimmicky signature weapon, casual misogyny/transphobia (for satirical purposes only), cartoonishly copious gallons of gore—it otherwise b

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Spider-Man: Brand New Day is my favorite kind of superhero story. Like the best issues/episodes of Teen Titans, ol’ web-head’s latest adventure starts with character conflict, then reverse engineers the plot from there. This applies even to the “obligatory” cameos. The Punisher’s appearance, for example, cannot simply be dismissed as gratuitous “fan service”; his role as a foil to our protagonist is absolut

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] The Samurai and the Prisoner is being marketed as a sort of Sengoku era whodunnit, with many of the cited pull quotes comparing it (favorably) to Knives Out, Columbo, and Agatha Christie. While these descriptions aren’t entirely inaccurate, they are also somewhat reductive and misleading. Although the movie certainly occupies the basic shape of the genre, the familiar tropes and conventions are merely skele

As I write these words, it is 5:15 in the morning, and I’m just getting out of a 1:50 screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It will, of course, be much later in the day when I actually post the finished review, but the current hour seems relevant to the discussion at hand because the theater was absolutely packed, and my fellow viewers remained enthusiastic and animated as they spilled out into the dew-drenched streets to greet the sunrise. That speaks volumes about h

Contrary to what the programmers at BAM would have you believe, Masahiro Shinoda’s The Burning Sunset is better known (in the West, at least) as Killers on Parade—which is honestly the more appropriate title, sacrificing poetic evocativeness for blunt accuracy. The film opens with the eponymous assassins—a ragtag rogues gallery of murderers for hire that includes a moonlighting physician, a jazz-obsessed youth, a grouchy old yakuza with little patience for “new blood,” and a

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Backrooms is one of those movies that lingers in your subconscious long after the end credits have rolled. My initial reaction to Kane Parsons' vision of “liminal horror” was, to be perfectly honest, rather lukewarm; while the direction was quite competent by the usual standards of a feature debut—moody, evocative, stylish—the plot frequently felt haphazardly structured and thinly sketched (particularly in

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler is a fascinating paradox. In some respects (e.g., in terms of its plot, narrative structure, and character archetypes), it’s a rather typical police procedural—albeit a remarkably lurid example of the genre by the standards of the late '60s (the degree of exploitative, voyeuristic sleaze in which it indulges is, in my experience, more commonly associated with the '70

[The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Youth Killer revolves around a brutal act of parricide. The catalyst for the crime is an argument regarding protagonist Jun Saiki’s “loose” girlfriend, but that isn’t really the cause—only the motive. Such conflicts are hardly uncommon, after all, and they rarely result in murder; what other environmental factors nurtured the irrational rage that ultimately culminated in violence? I

A few years ago, I caught a late flight back to New York after visiting home for the holidays. As is often the case with air travel, the journey was a series of small disasters: takeoff was delayed several times, turbulence made it impossible to get any shuteye, and my seat had a malfunctioning headphone port. For the sake of my sanity, I decided to occupy my mind by browsing the available DIRECTV channels. I eventually settled on The Matrix Revolutions (specifically the clim

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Quite early on in director Lav Diaz’s Magellan, the governor of a newly conquered territory outlines the Portuguese crown’s imperialist ambitions. Their mission, he explains to the assembled soldiers, is threefold: to spread Christianity at the point of a sword, to extinguish the influence of “heretical” religions, and—perhaps most importantly—to seize control of global trade routes, thus toppling rival nat

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] When I was growing up, the original Faces of Death was the most infamous film that nobody in my peer group had actually seen. It existed only as a whispered rumor that circulated around the school cafeteria: a movie that featured 100% genuine gore—authentic executions, suicides, Satanic rituals, car accidents, animal attacks, and autopsies. There was always an older kid that claimed to have acquired a b

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Recently, I’ve seen many hyperbolic statements circulating online declaring that Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 is the “best video game adaptation ever made.” Having never personally played the source material (which I’d honestly kind of dismissed as shallow streamer bait—mechanically simplistic, deliberately designed to provoke humorous reactions to jump scares, little else of substance to offer), I cannot acc

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE HEEN WARNED! ] I won’t beat around the bush: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie isn’t particularly good. Video games are already notoriously difficult to adapt—the medium is, after all, inherently interactive , a quality that cinema simply cannot replicate—and the folks at Illumination Entertainment make basically every wrong creative choice imaginable. The film lacks any semblance of a cohesive narrative structure, priori

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] At first glance, it’s a perfectly mundane image: the lobby of a public building. You’ve probably occupied hundreds of identical spaces over the course of your lifetime; indeed, the associated sensory details are so intimately familiar that a glimpse alone is enough to evoke them: the texture of the tile floor, the odor of the air conditioner, the faint buzz of the fluorescent lights. The longer your gaze