Review: “Forbidden Fruits”

Meredith Alloway’s wicked debut feature film, the off-beat horror comedy Forbidden Fruits, is a truly odd piece of work. Not odd because of its kooky premise, which centers around a group of young women who form a coven behind the scenes of the ritzy mall boutique where they work, their friendship and ideals built not […]

Review: “The Bride!”

In this video for Letterboxd, Jessie Buckley cites Barbara Stanwyck’s performance in the 1933 drama Baby Face as a key influence on her dual role as Mary Shelley and the Bride of Frankenstein in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (the obvious comp is Elsa Lanchester’s dual role as the same in James Whale’s 1935 film, although […]

Review: “Send Help”

About a third of the way into Sam Raimi’s Send Help, Rachel McAdams’ purportedly meek office drone Linda Liddle stabs the wild boar she’s been tracking to provide food for herself and Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), the obnoxious colleague she’s stranded on a remote island somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand with, in the face, […]

Review: “Chain Reactions”

What more can you say about a movie so iconic that there’s seemingly nothing new to be said? That sentiment doesn’t deter Alexandre O. Philippe, whose essay films encompass cinematic topics ranging from the obvious (David Lynch’s obsession with The Wizard of Oz, Kim Novak’s role in Vertigo) to the niche (the iconography of Monument […]

Venice 2025: “Frankenstein” (2025)

Rarely does anyone, when discussing Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, refer to it by its unabbreviated title: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan sent to Earth early in its creation to help humanity. But he gives them fire, a tool that begets knowledge, more civilized technology— and destruction. His defiance […]

Review: “Together”

Almost everything about Together— the debut feature from writer and director Michael Shanks— is precise. The formal rigor of its lore-heavy script. The perfectly matched leads in Dave Franco and Allison Brie, long-term partners in real life playing long-term partners on screen. The exquisitely-rendered visual effects, which are just squirm-inducing enough to make the audience […]

Review: “Dead Lover”

Dead Lover isn’t shy about its status as a Frankenstein riff. In fact, it opens with a quote from Mary Shelley’s novel: “There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.” In the story, this line is delivered by the doctor Victor Frankenstein, as he ponders what force may be compelling […]

Review: “28 Years Later”

Hope. That’s the element of Danny Boyle’s 2002 apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later that surprised me the most. Of course, a lot of my reaction can likely be credited to the fact that, despite its generally enthusiastic reception, it passed me by until I finally sought it out a couple months ago, and that […]

Review: “Sinners”

Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1932. The signs that this is the Jim Crow-era South perpetually exist on the periphery of the lives of the town’s Black residents: in the fields flecked with white cotton as far as the eye can see, where Black sharecroppers labor day in and day out, and in Hogwood (David Maldonado), the white […]

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 […]