[ 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

[ The following essay contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] A mad scientist meddles in “God’s domain” and pays the ultimate price. A pair of irresponsible camp counselors neglect the children under their supervision, instead sneaking off for some quick “hanky-panky”—thus incurring the wrath of a vengeful mother. The government ignores every conceivable warning sign and experiments on that strange unidentified object that plummeted from the sky, unleashing cosmic forces b

[ The following essay contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Bloober Team’s recent remake of Konami’s Silent Hill 2 begins in...

Director Ataru Oikawa’s cinematic adaptation of Tomie uses the basic premise of manga artist Junji Ito’s identically titled source...

The first thing you need to know about The King and the Mockingbird is that it is clearly the product of many disparate styles,...

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Greek drama is all about inevitability . The classical tragic...

Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies is a musical of sorts. Do not, however, go in expecting any show-stopping song-and-dance routines;...

One of the great pleasures of being an insatiably voracious cinephile is venturing off the beaten path of "canonical" classics and...

I’ll preface this review with a confession: I am not a particularly huge fan of the original Toxic Avenger . Having only first watched it...

I made a huge mistake. I succumbed to peer pressure on social media and, in the process, became a victim of the dreaded Fear of Missing...

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Kiyoshi Kurosawa is often described as a “J-horror” director, to the extent that casual fans could be forgiven for believing that he works exclusively in that particular genre. This assessment is, however, rather reductive and inaccurate; his actual filmography is significantly more diverse than his reputation (especially in the West) suggests, displaying an impressive degree of narrative and stylistic ve

Much like the legendary superhero around whom it revolves, the Menahem Golan-produced adaptation of Captain America is a relic of a...

If you were to plot all self-starring music biopics on a spectrum, with A Hard Day’s Night (shameless self-mythologizing) on one end and...

For my final screening of Japan Cuts 2025, I decided to go with the obligatory film about amateur filmmakers—a staple of the festival...

Promised Land is an appropriate title for Masashi Iijima’s surprisingly mature directorial debut. It is, after all, a film about the...

The documentary has evolved in recent years; films like And Everything Is Going Fine , Tower , and (to a lesser degree) Witches of the...

[ The following review contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning opens with a lengthy montage...

[The following review contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] The Final Destination franchise is horror at its most primal. Although...

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] As far as the art of adaptation goes, Thunderbolts* manages to...