(November 30, 2023)
OBITUARY. There should be something like a Scoville scale for dark humor, gradations of blackness that range from, say, a No. 2 pencil to the underwing of a raven to...
(November 23, 2023)
THANKSGIVING. The scream and spatter of slasher movies hasn't spoken to me for most of my horror-viewing life. It's not the violence or the blood alone that turns me off...
(November 16, 2023)
THE KILLER. Given what we know — or think we know — about David Fincher, it is almost too tempting to see his latest as a smirking work of...
(November 2, 2023)
THE ROYAL HOTEL. I was momentarily at a loss, Killers of the Flower Moon having left a rightful vacuum, both in terms of theatrical releases (who wants to follow that?)...
(October 26, 2023)
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. In a recent profile for the Los Angeles Times, Marissa R. Moss refers to "the radical empathy" of Jason Isbell, the frequently mis-described artist whose...
(October 19, 2023)
In my (lately frequent) absences, the Editor seems compelled to see and write almost exclusively about horror. I suspect the impetus for this is actually two-fold. Despite frequent, vociferous protestations,...
(October 12, 2023)
REPTILE. There are character actors and there are movie stars, and in between is Benicio Del Toro. Like many, I first became fully aware of Del Toro with The Usual...
(October 5, 2023)
DUMB MONEY. The big lie or the truth-at-large that remains largely unspoken, is that the stock market is any kind of democratic capitalist enterprise. By the logic of a casino,...
(September 28, 2023)
IT LIVES INSIDE. As deeply as the tropes of teen horror movies are carved in the genre, a shift in perspective, in setting, in character can turn them on their...
(September 21, 2023)
A HAUNTING IN VENICE. I am both an Agatha Christie fan and philistine, coming to her stories second hand, via my mother's avid reading and BBC productions. Drinking tea with...
(September 14, 2023)
THE NUN II. I would like to begin by acknowledging mistakes were made. Calendar editor Kali Cozyris and I giddily planned a trip to the movies as soon as we...
(September 7, 2023)
MOTHER'S DAY. In my zeal for streaming action movies out of Asia, I may have slept on Poland. The first five minutes of Mateusz Rakowicz's Dzien Matki, as it's...
(August 31, 2023)
GRAN TURISMO. How does one approach a project such as this one, for all intents and purposes a feature length advertisement for the Gran Turismo game (sorry, simulator) franchise, Playstation/Sony...
(August 24, 2023)
THE YOUTUBE EFFECT. As a Luddite, my contact with YouTube is infrequent, shallow and glancing: the occasional how-to, stand-up specials, squinty-eyed late-night music video ping-pong sessions, that's about it. Living...
(August 17, 2023)
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER. Before the title character in Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary novel Dracula drinks his way through England, he travels there on a ship called the...
(August 10, 2023)
THE MEG 2: THE TRENCH. Whether because or in spite of its unrepentant silliness (stupidity?), I found a lot to like about The Meg (2018). Jason Statham plying his acerbic...
