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: “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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Review: “Blink Twice”

When we first meet Frida (Naomi Ackie), she’s squatting on the toilet in the bathroom of the dingy apartment she shares with her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat), compulsively scrolling through Instagram on her phone. She’s sent down an exposition-heavy rabbit hole after landing on a video apology from billionaire tech mogul Slater King (Channing […]

Review: “MaXXXine”

“To be good is to be forgotten. I’m going to be so bad I’ll always be remembered. The reason good women like me and flock to my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman. I will continue doing vampires as long as people sin.” Theda Bara reportedly stated […]

Review: “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person”

It’s always refreshing to witness a new take on a well-worn genre. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, the feature directorial debut of Montreal-based director and co-writer Ariane Louis-Seize, doesn’t exactly contain any vampire movie tropes we haven’t seen before. It’s a little bit of a teen movie, a little bit of a horror film, […]

Holiday Classics: “Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?” (1972)

When we first meet Rosie Forrest (Shelley Winters), she’s sitting by a child’s bed wearing a lavish burgundy gown and white gloves, rocking it softly as she sings. She appears sweet, maternal. But when she finishes her song, we discover that Rosie hasn’t been singing to a human child, but to the mummified remains of […]