Fantastic Fest Review: “The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee”

“On the seventh of June in the year 2015 I passed away at the age of 93. By then I had become quite accustomed to dying.” Christopher Lee rises from the grave to narrate a documentary about his own life in Jon Spira’s The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee. That statement, uttered at the […]

Fantastic Fest Review: “The Spirit of Halloweentown”

I still remember the first time I watched Halloweentown: the night of its premiere on Disney Channel on October 17th, 1998. I had just turned eight years old, and every Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM, if you will) premiere was event television in my house. But there was something immediately special about Halloweentown, the story […]

Review: “Sleep”

The scary part is the lack of control. When you’re asleep, anything can happen. Your mind can dream up things wonderful and terrible. You can talk out loud. You can get up and move and walk with zero conscious control over your limbs. Recently, I fell asleep at my desk while working on a job […]

Fantastic Fest Dispatch: “What Happened to Dorothy Bell?”, “The Draft!”, “Ghost Killer”

Ghosts and supernatural entities are common threads weaving together these three films that premiered at Fantastic Fest 2024— the annual festival in Austin, Texas highlighting genre films— but those horror trappings also give way to character studies that are accomplished with varying degrees of success. Read on for my reviews of the found footage horror […]

TIFF Review: “Querido Trópico”

Fractured mother/daughter relationships make ripe stories for some of the most compelling cinema, even when they are versions of the same tale we’ve seen time and time again. That statement certainly applies to Querido Trópico (Beloved Tropic), a Panamanian drama that is the first narrative feature from director Ana Endara (who has four feature-length documentaries […]

Review: “Close Your Eyes”

Close Your Eyes is Victor Erice’s old man movie, but it feels reductive to say so. It’s also his love letter to cinema, but that is an even more inadequate attribution. After all, all of the filmmaker’s works, scattered as they have been over the decades, celebrate cinematic magic in some fashion. In The Spirit […]

Review: “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”

From just casually scrolling on the internet, it seems like so many people have heralded Beetlejuice Beetlejuice— the much-delayed sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 horror comedy Beetlejuice— as a return to form for the director, in no small part due to its irreverent sense of humor and generous employment of practical effects. But watching the […]