Category Archives: Long Reviews (>400 Words)

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination 3 (2006) Movie Review

James Wong and Glen Morgan returned to the Final Destination franchise with the third installment, which some consider the high mark of the series. Final Destination 3 replicated, almost to the exact number, the box office performance of the first film ($54 million domestic, $112 worldwide). Narratively speaking, though, it is the first film in the series to consciously break from the characters and events of that initial film.

The opening premonition sequence stands out as one of the best the series has to offer. I personally still prefer the highway pileup in Final Destination 2 for its visual cohesion, but for the frenetic pacing of the rollercoaster disaster, Wong does succeed in making the action mostly clear and suspenseful. The scene plays out as all the others do: One person sees a strangely detailed vision of a horrific accident that kills dozens, then comes to and causes a massive scene. A few people get pulled away from the site of the oncoming accident as a result, setting the stage for the specter of Death to come and right the cosmic scales.

Inexplicably, a character who survives the rollercoaster discovers the crashed plane and the entire plot of Final Destination, so that the characters can get an easy jumpstart on understanding what is happening to them. The attempt for these sequels to Continue reading Final Destination 3 (2006) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination 2 (2003) Movie Review

After the financial success of Final Destination in 2000 ($53 million domestic, $112 million worldwide), New Line Cinema went ahead with a sequel. Director James Wong and writers Glen Morgan and Jeffrey Reddick did not return, leaving the sequel with a new creative team in David R. Ellis and screenwriters Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (the latter two had no other credits at the time). Final Destination 2 would become the worst box office performing entry in the franchise (but it did provide a death so memorable and emblematic of the series that it features prominently in the TV ads for the new Final Destination: Bloodlines).

Final Destination 2 begins with the terrible decision of having a crackpot talk show guest describe the grand design of death and how the events of the first film couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. It’s a clumsy device to remind audiences of the plot of the first film, but it also creates a story world where characters are hyper-aware of the premise of the film they are a part of. Almost immediately, the protagonist, Kimberly (A.J. Cook), connects the freak accident she just experienced on the highway with the plane crash from the first film. This is efficient storytelling, I suppose, but it also lazily yadda-yadda-yaddas the finer points of the series’ premise.

The premonition sequence of the second film is fairly well-done. Some of the visual effects don’t look the absolute cleanest, but it is fun to watch the geography of the highway unfold, introducing our cast of characters and delivering a few gnarly gags. And the end of it is a genuinely surprising turnabout.

David R. Ellis, the director, spent much of his career in the stunt world. It is fitting, then, that the staging and execution of this opening sequence is exciting. Some of the other set pieces are exciting, too, albeit more mildly so. Whether intentional or not, the death scenes are also Continue reading Final Destination 2 (2003) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Final Destination (2000) Movie Review

With Final Destination: Bloodlines coming out this summer, I have decided to take a trip down memory lane and re-watch the entire franchise of you-can’t-cheat-Death-because-he-will-come-for-you-but-also-play-with-his-food-by-making-your-death-an-elaborate-Rube-Goldberg-device-of-death horror flicks. It is an odd franchise. The films were always mildly profitable and regularly found airplay on cable. But they also consistently got middling reviews, and the franchise holds something of a lesser status in the horror genre pantheon.

Final Destination and Final Destination 3 were directed by James Wong, and they were written and produced by Wong and his creative partner Glen Morgan. Wong and Morgan were regular writers on The X-Files and wrote some memorable episodes (“Squeeze,” “E.B.E.,” “Home”). Wong directed a good episode of the show titled “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.” He also directed the heinous Dragonball: Evolution, but for the purposes of this review we won’t hold it against him.

The opening portion of Final Destination feels reminiscent of an episode of The X-Files (it was originally written as one by Jeffrey Reddick), and it has a sense of irony that looks like The Twilight Zone if you squint a little. A high school kid named Alex (Devon Sawa) has an irrational and superstitious fear of flying. He wants to keep the tag on his bag from the last flight he was on, because he knows that that plane landed safely. When he gets to the airport, he can’t help but notice Continue reading Final Destination (2000) Movie Review →

2025 Academy Awards, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

2025 Academy Award Predictions — My Oscar Ballot

In previous years, I have taken the time to break down every Oscar race, assess each nominee’s odds, and ultimately give a prediction in each category. This year, time is short, so here we are. Last second predictions.

Here is one film critic’s ballot of Oscar predictions, full of hedged bets, personal opinions, the occasional bold swing, and pauses for halfhearted explanation.

Best Picture

Will Win: Anora
Could Win: The Brutalist
Biased Opinion: The Substance or Nickel Boys should win

I mulled over the possibilities of Continue reading 2025 Academy Award Predictions — My Oscar Ballot →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Captain America: Brave New World (2025) Movie Review

I’d be lying if I told you that I was a Marvel fan. I’d be lying if I told you that I have held even an iota of anticipation for the last phase of Marvel films (I didn’t even watch The Marvels). That said, I can’t clearly see how a Marvel fan would get much of satisfaction out of the MCU’s latest outing, Captain America: Brave New World. Unless you are a die-hard stan for fictional metals from the Marvel universe, even the easter eggs in this are going to come off as sub-par.

Marvel appears to be hoping that the back-half of their 2025 slate – made up of Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four: First Steps – will drum up some sort of resurgence for the MCU. These films also serve as the bridge between Marvel’s fifth and sixth phases, meaning that Continue reading Captain America: Brave New World (2025) Movie Review →

2025 Academy Awards, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Academy Awards 2025: Oscar Race Changes Direction after Critics, DGA, and PGA Announce Winners

Heading into this weekend, the 2025 Oscar season was already a complicated conversation. Embroiled in controversy, the one-time favorite from Netflix, Emilia Pérez, found its awards chances slipping through its fingers. The film was already a controversial film when it left Oscar nomination morning with the most nominations (13). The ensuing discovery of not-so-old social media posts from actress Karla Sofia Gascon has added significant baggage to the film’s campaign.

In an attempt to cut Gascon out of the film’s broader Oscar campaign, director Jacques Audiard has distanced himself from the actress and denounced her posts (Audiard himself has received his own share of criticism for some interview faux pas). And Gascon has stopped campaigning alongside the film’s other nominees.

Still, a meaningful rebound for Emilia Pérez will be difficult, and frankly there is not a lot of time left for Netflix and the film’s stable of nominees to convince Academy voters to stick with the film that they gave a baker’s dozen nominations.

The frontrunner status for Emilia Pérez was Continue reading Academy Awards 2025: Oscar Race Changes Direction after Critics, DGA, and PGA Announce Winners →

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 →

Lists, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The 10 Best Movies of 2024

Out goes one year; in comes the next. A steady temporal turnstile incessantly reminding us that while we may slow down, the astronomical structures dictating our cultural conception of time are rigid enough as to appear as a constant. In other words, my eyes need a rest.

In other other words, it is best-of-the-year time for all matters cultural discourse. There really is little value to it, this arbitrary comparison between pieces of media based on a calendar release date (usually region-specific, to make it all the less comprehensive). The numbers mean virtually nothing. The voices speaking are minuscule, as they beat the drum for individual and subjective tastes but under the guise of a universal acceptance that these here cultural objects are worth categorizing and hierarchizing into list-like structures for other people’s amusement (and, often, a confirmation of those other people’s own individual and subjective tastes).

In short, I am one iota of cultural detritus contributing to this “online discourse” problem, fueling factional groupthink under some self-prescribed claim to expertise. Or I just feel like Continue reading The 10 Best Movies of 2024 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), musical

A Complete Unknown (2024) Movie Review

No matter how you want to trace the lineage of the music biopic, we don’t arrive at a formula-to-an-absolute-fault film like Bohemian Rhapsody without first traveling through James Mangold’s Walk the Line. To see Johnny Cash resurface in Mangold’s return to the genre (now played by a perpetually suave Boyd Holbrook) is like witnessing a poltergeist haunting another film. Or a demon that somehow escaped total exorcism from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a superior take down of the music biopic and a film that remains culturally relevant so long as Hollywood continues churning out mediocre celebrations of celebrity.

Walk the Line was a crossover success, breaking $100 million at the box office, garnering generally positive reviews, and earning a number of accolades including an Oscar for Reese Witherspoon. A Complete Unknown is angling to do the same. The problem (perhaps) is that Continue reading A Complete Unknown (2024) Movie Review →