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Sunday, July 26, 2020

Caged Birds

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Olivia De Havilland died this week at the age of 104. It sometimes seemed to us film fans that she would live forever. She was the last of ...
Tuesday, March 10, 2020

True/False 2020: Lingering Traumas

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This year's True/False Film Festival brings a couple of films about the lingering effects of trauma. This is a constant well of subjec...
Sunday, March 08, 2020

True/False 2020: Tales of Two Cities

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The annual True/False Film Festival went on as scheduled this weekend in my fair city. There was a whistling-past-the-graveyard feeling to ...
Saturday, February 29, 2020

Now You See Him

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One of the enduring challenges facing horror movies is finding things that really scare an audience. Most horror movies fail at this, or ab...
Saturday, February 22, 2020

Island Reveries

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I suppose it was too much to hope that a new version of Fantasy Island (2020, directed by Jeff Wadlow) would be something other than a bun...
Saturday, February 08, 2020

Screwed

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"But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so pro...
Friday, January 31, 2020

The Darkest Part of the Forest

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“Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the...
Sunday, January 26, 2020

In No Man's Land

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Only the dead were always present—present As a vile sickly smell of rottenness; The rustling stubble and the early grass, The slimy pool...
Saturday, January 11, 2020

Oceanic Dread

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Underwater (2020, directed by William Eubank) is a relentless horror movie that puts its foot on the gas at the outset and never lets it ...
Saturday, November 09, 2019

Wills and Fates

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"Our wills and fates do so contrary run" -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet There's a philosophical problem buried in the second ...
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Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Post Mortem

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...But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will And make...
Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Escapist Entertainment

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Note: I wrote most of this in January of 2019 and neglected to publish it. I rewatched Escape Room for the October Challenge and remembered...
Sunday, October 20, 2019

Unmask, Unmask...

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The Masque of the Red Death (1964, directed by Roger Corman) was originally planned to be the second of Corman's Poe films for America...
Thursday, October 10, 2019

If That Nightingale Won't Sing

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The Nightingale (2018) shares some elements with director Jennifer Kent's debut film, The Babadook . Both films are about motherhood....
Tuesday, October 08, 2019

Hell On Wheels

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Such was Stephen King's popularity in 1983, that work on the film version of his novel, Christine , began while the book was still bein...
Saturday, October 05, 2019

Double Your Pleasure

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By 1971, Hammer Films were grasping at straws, trying desperately to stay relevant in a changing marketplace. There was a sea change coming...
Friday, October 04, 2019

Sleeping Like the Dead

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Welcome to another installment of the annual October Horror Movie Challenge. The goal, as always, is to watch 31 horror movies before the c...
Saturday, August 24, 2019

The Family That Plays Together...

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Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. Ready or Not (2019, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) hit theaters a m...
Friday, August 09, 2019

Two for the Road

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I knew I was going to owe my brain an apology when I sat down to watch The Fast and the Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019, directe...
Saturday, July 13, 2019

Keeping the Gators Fed

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Crawl (2019, directed by Alexandre Aja) isn't nearly as much fun as Piranha , the director's last foray into the revolt of nature ...
Saturday, May 18, 2019

Adding Color to the Sky

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"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky."--Rabindranath Tag...
Saturday, April 13, 2019

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

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"The devil is not as black as he is painted." -- Dante, The Inferno I have to admit, I was looking forward to the new Hellboy ...
Saturday, March 23, 2019

Last Exit to Nowhere

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My friend, Willow Catelyn, has written an excellent essay about Detour in her ongoing posts about the Criterion Channel's movies of th...
Thursday, March 07, 2019

True/False 2019: Scenes from the Resistance

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There are always countervailing narratives at True/False (and, I imagine, at other documentary festivals). For every apocalyptic cautionary...
Monday, March 04, 2019

True/False 2019: A Boot to the Face Forever

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George Orwell, ever the optimist, once suggested that "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--fo...
Saturday, March 02, 2019

True/False 2019: The Queen of Soul and the Queen of the Bronx

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Amazing Grace (2018, directed by Sydney Pollack and completed by Alan Elliot) chronicles the recording of the album of the same name by Ar...
Thursday, February 28, 2019

True/False 2019 Day One: Moonshots and Provocations

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I thought last year's True/False Film Festival was an off year, in spite of crowd-pleasers like Three Identical Strangers and Won'...
Friday, November 30, 2018

Beating the Devil

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Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil (2017, directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo) is based on a fairy tale with deep Indo-European roots, on...
Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Sighs and Whispers

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The most instantly noticeable difference between Dario Argento's original Suspiria and Luca Guadagnino's 2018 cover version is the ...
Sunday, November 11, 2018

Monsters During Wartime

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Some years ago, the Criterion people produced a disc for a forgotten film from the 1970s called Overlord by a director named Stuart Cooper...