Review: “Paddington in Peru”

I do wonder how I might have received Paddington in Peru had I not had such an immediately ardent reaction to the two preceding films in the series. I’m not exaggerating when I say that 2014’s Paddington and 2017’s Paddington 2 are masterpieces of family entertainment that I’ve rewatched ad nauseam in the years since […]

Review: “Heart Eyes”

For a while, Heart Eyes is about as stuck on what it wants to say about love as those guys on Hinge who only seem interested in talking about beer, that one trip they took abroad five years ago, and The Office. Bearing the tagline “Romance is dead,” director Josh Ruben’s slasher/rom-com mash-up opens with […]

Review: “Grand Theft Hamlet”

To game, perchance to dream. During the United Kingdom’s third COVID-19 related lockdown in 2021, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen— London-based actors unable to find work while their industry remained at a standstill— found a way to merge two seemingly disparate interests: Shakespeare, and Grand Theft Auto. The latter— an online open world video game […]

Review: “Presence”

Director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp understand that there are infinitely more frightening things in the world than paranormal entities. That becomes increasingly evident throughout Presence, the duo’s second collaboration following their crackerjack 2022 thriller Kimi. Perhaps it’s rooted in the fact that they were each somewhat inspired by their personal close brushes with […]

Review: “Wolf Man”

The opening of Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man isn’t supremely tense or novel, but it is, at least, promising. Grady Lovell (Sam Jaeger) is hunting with his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) in the forest surrounding their remote Oregon home. The prologue’s doom-laden text, detailing rumors surrounding a missing hiker in the area and a possible […]

Review: “The Last Showgirl”

About midway through The Last Showgirl, we see Pamela Anderson’s Shelly Gardner curled up in the living room of her Las Vegas home, watching a movie. The two shots we briefly see flash across the screen— first of woman clad in a long gown hoisting a glittering hoop, a bevy of chorus girls lying at […]

Best Movies of 2024

I wasn’t so sure that this year ended up being such a great one for movies, at least for me. Some of 2024’s most acclaimed mainstream hits like Challengers, Dune Part 2, and Anora that have been sweeping the awards circuit were mostly misses for me. But when I started combing back through my Letterboxd […]

Holiday Classics: “The Curse of the Cat People” (1944)

Cat People was a big box office hit for RKO Pictures when it was released in 1942. The horror film, stylishly directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton (the mind behind the studio’s successful run of B genre films), has been hugely influential in the decades since its release, from its dive into […]

Review: “A Complete Unknown”

You can’t fully know Bob Dylan. Thats’s something that Todd Haynes understood when he made I’m Not There, his radical 2007 biopic that crafts an image of the legendarily enigmatic musician’s life in fragments portrayed by six different actors, ranging from a young Black boy to Cate Blanchett. Perhaps that’s also something that director James […]

Holiday Classics: “I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes” (1948)

You should never throw your shoes at a cat, no matter how much their midnight meowing keeps you up at night. You especially shouldn’t do it if you’re Tom Quinn (Don Castle), a struggling tap dancer who sits at home anxiously awaiting the return of his taxi dancer wife Ann (Elyse Knox) from work, where […]