[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] When I was younger, I was obsessed with the phenomenon of “backmasking.” I have many fond memories of huddling over my desk until three o’clock in the morning, illuminated only by the glow of my computer monitor, listening intently to reversed audio clips. Being a skeptic, of course, I never truly believed that the purported “hidden messages” contained therein were authentic. Nevertheless, I marveled at t

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] A fiery sun blazes in a golden sky, scorching the earth below. Restless insects buzz and drone relentlessly, filling the still, sweltering air with a monotonous cacophony. And draped above a fleet of beached ships, limp sails hang motionlessly, undisturbed by even the gentlest breeze. The opening images of Iphigenia  immediately establish the film’s central conflict and narrative stakes. The assembled arm

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] There’s something inherently unnerving about shot-on-video horror. For an entire generation—namely, my own—the near universal accessibility of VHS made it the medium of the average Joe; its visual language was that of everyday life: weddings, birthday parties, Christmas mornings, family reunions, school functions. Consequently, images of violence (even obviously simulated violence) captured by commercial

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The “revenge film” has become a genre unto itself at this point. Death Wish , Rolling Thunder , John Wick , Lady Snowblood , Oldboy , any of the innumerable adaptations of Hamlet —viewers have become so intimately familiar with the basic tropes, conventions, and archetypes associated with these stories that I needn’t even bother listing them. The deceptively yet appropriately titled Revenge , on the other

[ The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Lancelot du lac  both begins and ends with scenes of shockingly graphic violence. Two knights clad in cumbersome suits of armor clash on a desolate battlefield, so thoroughly exhausted that they can barely lift their weapons. Finally, one combatant lands a decisive blow, beheading his opponent with one last desperate flail of his sword; the decapitated corpse collapses in a limp heap, gushing blood onto t

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Matango  is often dismissively described as a campy creature feature. Indeed, its basic premise—a group of vacationers stranded on a desert island encounter a hallucinogenic, radioactive mushroom that gradually transforms anyone that consumes it into a hideously grotesque mutant—makes it sound like the sort of trashy B-movie that Joel and the bots would mercilessly lampoon on Mystery Science Theater 3000

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Beneath its slick production values, gory special effects (including, but not limited to: shattered teeth, gouged-out eyes, mangled limbs, and bitten-off fingers), and zany slapstick gags (many of the aforementioned injuries are played for dark comedy), Send Help  is a movie about society in its purest form, exploring what happens when traditional hierarchies crumble and two people on very  different leve

Attended the Orphans at MoMA: At Play—Amateurs, Animators, and Avant-Gardes  program at the Museum of Modern Art today. What a delightful celebration of the miracle of film preservation! The showcase (a recurring component of the venue’s annual To Save and Project  festival) revolved around an eclectic grab bag of obscure cinematic oddities: avant-garde  experiments, documentaries, early talkies designed to be viewed in the comfort of one's own home, and much, much more. The

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] As a cinematic adaptation of Konami’s Silent Hill 2 , director Christophe Gans’ Return to Silent Hill  fails spectacularly. I don’t resent it for taking liberties with its source material, of course. Indeed, I’d argue that some of its changes—e.g., the revised setting of the climax—are elegantly pragmatic. Many of the more foundational alterations, however, are absolutely detrimental to the story, diminis

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] All You Need Is Kill  is based on the same novel that inspired 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow  (also marketed under the equally unimaginative—though admittedly accurate—title of Live Die Repeat ), but apart from their shared premise—time loop, aliens, mechanized armor, the many brutal deaths of the protagonist—the two adaptations couldn’t possibly be more different. Whereas the earlier Tom Cruise vehicle is a fa

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] I often extol the virtues of “economical” screenplays: in the most entertaining movies (those that belong to the “blockbuster” category, anyway), every  detail is essential and indispensable. Predator: Badlands  provides a good recent example of this storytelling discipline: the various obstacles established in the first two acts are eventually revisited during the climax—usually to be utilized as improvi

[ The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Season 2 of Andor  unfolds with an oppressive degree of urgency and a palpable sense of inevitability. With the threat of the Death Star looming on the horizon (indeed, intermittent title cards supply a literal ticking clock, counting down the years until A New Hope’s  Battle of Yavin—not to mention the title character’s eventual demise), the walls are closing in on Rebel and Imperial alike. The Empire, de

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] There’s a sequence approximately two-thirds of the way through Avatar: Fire and Ash  so deftly orchestrated that I nearly levitated out of my seat as it unfolded. After protagonist Jake Sully is arrested and imprisoned by the corrupt forces of Earth’s imperialist military (this is not spoiler, by the way; Jake’s perp walk appears in even the earliest available marketing materials), three separate, uncoord

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HABE BEEN WARNED! ] Knives Out  was intended to be Rian Johnson’s definitive thesis on the traditional whodunnit—a thorough dissection of the various tropes, conventions, and archetypes traditionally associated with the style of locked room mystery codified by such authors as Agatha Christie. It is therefore only appropriate that it immediately leaps into the action, opening with the discovery of a corpse and retroactively p

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The existence of Wicked: For Good  may very well be remembered as the most misguided creative decision in the history of cinema—as far as Hollywood blockbusters of the 21st Century are concerned, anyway. Splitting a single adaptation into multiple parts with a year-long delay between the release of each installment is bad enough already (and it’s hardly a recent phenomenon—see Harry Potter and the Deathly

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The overall quality of the Predator  franchise has always been rather… inconsistent . Although the first film is an undisputed action/horror/sci-fi masterpiece (and if you disagree, kindly keep it to yourself), its high-concept premise only stretches so far, leading to diminishing returns with each subsequent installment (2022’s excellent Prey notwithstanding, despite the clear limitations of its straigh

In the past, I often made it a point to watch at least one John Carpenter film on Halloween night (though a double feature was always preferable). For various reasons, my commitment to the informal tradition has lapsed over time, but the Criterion Channel’s recent curated retrospective of the certified Master of Horror’s work provided a convenient excuse to return to it. Rather than revisit an old, tried-and-true favorite (e.g., The Thing , They Live ), however, I decided to

[ The following essay contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Of manga  author Junji Ito’s innumerable masterpieces (including such long-running series as Tomie  and Uzumaki  and self-contained one-shots like The Enigma of Amigara Fault  and The Hell of the Doll Funeral ), Town of No Roads  is probably his most flawed. Its sprawling, expansive themes strain against a narrative too narrow and restrictive to properly contain them, the central allegory and its orbiting metaph

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] While there is much to savor in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein —the magnificent performances (particularly that of Jacob Elordi, who previously established his horror credentials as Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla ); the pragmatically adapted script, which adopts a diptych structure bookended by a framing device to approximate the source material’s convoluted epistolary format; Alexandre Desplat’s s

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] New Group  is a film about the horrors of conformity. The theme of collectivism gone awry is woven into every image. Symmetrical compositions abound, from sprawling grids of suburban homes to neatly arranged rows of desks. High schoolers bow, march, and chant in meticulously practiced unison, drilled ad nauseam  by tyrannical authority figures. And then, of course, there’s the bluntly literal manifestatio