Monthly Archives: January 2025

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Psychotronic

F CinemaScore Double Features: mother! (2017) and Moonchild (1972)

This is a new series centering on films which have received “F” scores from CinemaScore. CinemaScore polls theater-goers during a film’s opening weekend, gauging the average consumer’s thoughts on new releases. An F CinemaScore is potentially a PR nightmare for a film, as it indicates that, on the main, the people most excited to see a film on its opening weekend hated it.

We’ve covered F CinemaScore films on this site before, including Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly (which I think is fairly great) and the subject of this article, mother! With this series, we pair an ill-fated F CinemaScore movie with a second, thematically similar film and make a double feature out of it. Today’s double feature pairs Darren Aronofsky’s mother! with Alan Gadney’s New Age, surreal spiritual journey film Moonchild.

This is Part 1 of an ongoing series. However, future installments will be published on a new Substack newsletter called Bleeding Eye Cinema. Part 2 of the CinemaScore Double Feature series is already live at that site. On Bleeding Eye Cinema, we take a look at weird, WTF, underseen, cult, psychotronic, B- and Z-grade, and all other manner of headache-inducing movies. Come join us and let the CRT electron beams melt the jelly off your eyeballs!

Moonchild (Alan Gadney, 1972)

Moonchild begins with a quote from clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, an influential figure in what would come to be known as the New Age movement: “You may not even have to come back at all if you become perfectly developed in this life…”

One of Cayce’s trance-induced contributions to culture were his proclamations to the existence of fictional locations like Atlantis. Cayce may be the most fitting place to enter into Continue reading F CinemaScore Double Features: mother! (2017) and Moonchild (1972) →

2025 Academy Awards, Award Ceremonies, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Surprises from the 2025 Oscar Nominations

Spoiler alert: There aren’t many.

The 2025 Academy Awards nominations have been announced, officially solidifying the Oscar campaigns of a number of awards hopefuls.

Many of the films nominated were the ones prognosticators were expecting. Truly, the most shocked I was watching Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott announce the nominees was seeing the Elton John song get a Best Original Song nomination. Even with this, after thinking about it for a moment, it made reasonable sense as a nomination.

As much as we can talk about surprises, these are the snubs and unexpected noms from this morning’s announcement.

Best Picture Snubs

Given the Academy’s recent track record of nominating a buzzy non-American production in Best Picture (this year there are two), it is not a total shock to see Continue reading Surprises from the 2025 Oscar Nominations →

Psychotronic

Introducing: Bleeding Eye Cinema on Substack

Happy New Year, dear reader! 2025 is a special year at CineFiles Reviews, as the arbitrary markings of time that we have chosen to organize our lives around dictate that it is this site’s 10th anniversary.

To celebrate, I have ventured to begin a new outlet for film criticism: Bleeding Eye Cinema. There is a category of odd media that I would like to cover but which does not necessarily fit nicely within this site’s coverage of mainly new releases. I have dabbled in it here before, with a short series on psychotronic movies and occasional one-off analysis pieces about wacky misfires like Foodfight!. By and large, though, the style of writing here generally hews closer to the stuffy, boring film criticism voice, where I snidely look down my nose at contemporary cinema and pretend to have what they call “expertise” on the subject.

This is all to say that the writing style at Bleeding Eye Cinema is slightly different, and I think it is best to Continue reading Introducing: Bleeding Eye Cinema on Substack →