Tag Archives: movie review

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 →

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 →

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

Carry-On (2024) Movie Review

Carry-On is the dumb-as-rocks holiday crowd pleaser of the year, and many involved in its execution are game for embracing the buffoonery.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra had graduated from low-budget horror and slick low-budget action films to the Hollywood studio big leagues. To be clear, this graduation implies only an elevation in budgetary cushion, as his films for Disney and Warners — Jungle Cruise and Black Adam respectively — gave up propulsive energy for glossy studio sheen. Jungle Cruise is mildly entertaining and pleasant enough, for what it’s worth. But it feels like a lazy river compared to even the lowliest of Liam Neeson thriller. And Black Adam…well, we saw how that turned out.

In returning to the high concept action-thriller in the vein of the airport novel, but doing so under the Netflix banner, Collet-Serra scales back from the Continue reading Carry-On (2024) Movie Review →

Lists, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The 10 Worst Movies of 2024

Every year, I waffle in my decision to publish a worst-of year end list or to abstain. In most instances, it is an empty exercise to contribute to the ongoing discussion over the churn and lack of creativity in the media industries, and in Hollywood in particular.

On the other hand, negativity is not only the Internet’s main reason for being; it can also be productive. With each passing year in which franchises continue to circle the box office drain, celebrities fluff themselves up in vanity projects, and cheap cash grabs slip under the cultural radar, it feels more useful to mock than to ignore. In short, standards are necessary. And the bar doesn’t have to be high, either. Something always slips under like a world class limbo competitor.

These are 10 of those films which didn’t make the grade in 2024.

10. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Despite minor improvements over the previous installment, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire proves that nostalgia-driven intellectual property maintenance has a ceiling so low that Continue reading The 10 Worst Movies of 2024 →

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

Screamfest 2024 Movie Reviews

The Screamfest Horror Film Festival recently wrapped up its 24th annual edition at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, California. Here are reviews of a selection of the program’s films.

Antropophagus Legacy

Dario Germani’s Antropophagus Legacy is, perhaps, a continuation of his 2022 film Antropophagus II, itself a sequel (if only in name) to the 1980 cult cannibal film Antropophagus.

This flesh-eating entry follows Hanna (Valentina Corti), who we meet recovering in a hospital bed after her husband’s death (which she is promptly accused of). It is revealed to Hanna by a nurse that Continue reading Screamfest 2024 Movie Reviews →

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

Terrifier 3 (2024) Movie Review

I do not own, let alone clutch at, pearls. When done right, bad taste is the best taste.

The problem with Terrifier 3, the latest in the hyper-violent splatter/slasher franchise from Damien Leone, is not the gore. Don’t get me wrong, the warning should be clear: the faint of heart ought to steer clear of this one. The squishy, bloody, extreme to the limits of extreme violence is not what makes the Terrifier films objectionable; no, that is the main draw. It is the reason why a niche audience propelled the third entry to the number one spot at the domestic box office.

The gore of it all is just fine. In fact, it seems integral to Leone’s macabre vision of the modern slasher. Some would argue that the extremes of Continue reading Terrifier 3 (2024) Movie Review →

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

Review: Queens of Drama — Fantastic Fest 2024

Queens of Drama is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

Alexis Langlois’s Queens of Drama is a riff on the A Star is Born formula, wherein the young, bright-eyed ingenue is thrust into a world of celebrity that bends and breaks them. The young star-to-be in question is Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), a quiet 18-year-old auditioning for an American Idol-adjacent singing competition. While there, she meets Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura), another competing hopeful. In some ways, their drastically different experiences with the singing audition paves the way for their diverging paths toward pop notoriety.

The film quickly establishes a dichotomy between the American Idol-ization of mainstream pop and a much more sonically potent underground music scene. In both cases, Continue reading Review: Queens of Drama — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape — Fantastic Fest 2024

Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

I have said my piece about the “compilation” film on this website before. In fact, I made some complaints about the format a few months ago when From My Cold Dead Hands played the Fantasia Festival. I’ll be brief about it here. The compilation/mixtape format is, by its design, artistically limiting. In borrowing from existing content, the artistry of the resulting film derives mostly from the edit. Why is this found footage being compiled, organized, and edited in this way? If the answer is, “I don’t know,” then the compilation has not succeeded in properly compiling.

The best of the format will create new meaning out of existing materials, or will resituate the original meaning of the materials in a way that produces new understanding. In short: the compilation film ought to Continue reading Review: Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape — Fantastic Fest 2024 →