Watcher premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is competing in its U.S. Dramatic competition.
Chloe Okuno’s feature debut Watcher is a thriller in the Rear Window tradition. Americans Julia (Maika Monroe) and Francis (Karl Glusman) move to Bucharest after Francis receives a promotion. Julia does not have a job here and does not speak Romanian, two facts which isolate her in her new environment, leaving her on edge as she goes about her days largely alone. And it does not help that Continue reading Watcher (2022) Movie Review→
Emergency premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is competing in the festival’s U.S Dramatic competition.
Carey Williams’ 2018 film Emergency won Sundance’s Special Jury Prize for short-form filmmaking. He adapted this short, with KD Davila serving as screenwriter, into a feature film of the same name. The film is one part buddy comedy, one part coming-of-age movie, and one part drama reflecting on multiple tensions present in the American conscious. If this sounds like three things which do not go together, you aren’t wrong. The extent to which one buys into the tonal tightrope walk Emergency is attempting is crucial to the enjoyment of the film.
I bought in. Perhaps not hook, line, and sinker. But taking this film on its own terms, following it through its kinks and lumps, I was met with a Continue reading Emergency (2022) Movie Review→
The extra-textual more or less fuels Hollywood at this point. Intertextuality and metatextuality exists in all manner of blockbuster cinema. And this certainly bleeds through to the audiences. Even casual moviegoers have become intimately aware of the larger, interconnected puzzle that makes up the Marvel cinematic universe, enough so that Spider-Man: No Way Home is released not as some esoteric nerdcore comic book movie which only the most knowledgeable fans are able to follow. No, it is one of the most profitable films ever, regardless of pandemic concerns.
This is not to discredit audience literacy over the way Hollywood functions, of course. And the self-referential, metatextual, etc. has been around in cinema for Continue reading Scream (2022) Movie Review→
The Golden Globes awards were announced last night, January 9. No red carpet. No fanfare. No televised event. Just the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) sending out the names of winners via social media. The full list of winners was later publicized in a press release. It was nothing compared to previous years, where the star-studded event has been known for launching Hollywood’s award season.
“Top.” “Best.” What do these words mean? Nothing, really. They are SEO-friendly buzzwords which stand for nothing in particular. Objectivity is a lie. These are my opinions, thus this (like all Top 10 lists) means only what you want it to. If your favorite movie doesn’t make the cut of this list, I either didn’t see it or didn’t like it.
Speaking of SEO-friendly keywords, let’s talk about “Worst.” Normally, I end the year with two annual lists, one for the best movies and one for the worst. Weird as 2021 was for movie releases, I did manage to see roughly 175 titles which are eligible for this list. All the same, those I didn’t like were Continue reading Top 10 Best Movies of 2021→
Warning: this review hints at major spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home.
I haven’t posted on this site since October 15, almost two months to the day that I’m writing this. But I’m going to pretend like that’s not the case, and that I’m a normal film critic and not a graduate student with a job who has realized that it is hard to find time to balance one’s responsibilities with film critic hobbyism.
Anyway…how about that Marvel Studios, huh? Bouncing back from a rough year at the theatrical box office, Disney’s theatrical cash cow had four movies in the can for 2021. Following a glorious financial success with Avengers: Endgame, the studio needed a firm reset of its film properties (its streaming series properties have done their own legwork in moving the IP forward).
Halloween Kills is so busy being a sequel to Halloween (2018) and Halloween (1978) that it forgets to be a coherent horror film. Don’t get me wrong, David Gordon Green’s follow-up to his 2018 hit reboot is a bloody mess of a slasher movie (in a good way). But it is also a bloody mess of a script (in a bad way).
The Slumber Party Massacre (2021) is screening as part of the 2021 Fantastic Fest.
The original The Slumber Party Massacre, written by Rita Mae Brown and directed by Amy Holden Jones, holds a special place in my heart, as it does for a number of slasher fans. The 1982 cult film was delightfully subversive, coming in the midst of the glut of slashers from the 1970s-80s
V/H/S/94 is screening as part of the 2021 Fantastic Fest.
V/H/S/94, the fourth installment in the cult horror anthology film series, follows the franchise’s weakest entry, V/H/S: Viral, a forgettable and occasionally downright lazy film. 94 marks the return of Simon Barrett and Timo Tjahjanto, the former of which had a hand in both V/H/S and V/H/S/2 and the latter of which directed a segment in the second film. It seems evident that this film is meant to be a course correction of sorts.
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