Well, I did it: I got an article up on Vulture. Maybe it’ll be the only one I do, though I really fucking hope not. If so, hey, I have that byline, and that’s another checkmark on my list of goals for 2017 (and just in the nick of time, which is generally how I … Continue reading
Just in the nick of time: Here’s my review of Black Mirror‘s fourth season. In a word, it’s superb. In more words, well, hey now – you’re not getting my thoughts out of me that easily. In the real world, don’t have the kind of technology that lets you do that. If we lived in the Black Mirror-verse, maybe … Continue reading
As usual, as I do each year (each year, at least, since first creating this blog), and as you expect me to do, I have compiled my top ten list for 2017. Also as usual, that list includes five honorable mentions. Not at all as usual, I’ve generously expanded this annual enterprise to include two of … Continue reading
I’m a Daniel Day-Lewis partisan, I guess, because I can’t accept the idea that any actor in any movie in 2017 performs better than he does in Phantom Thread, but I can’t complain about Saoirse Ronan taking the top spot for her work in Lady Bird. …oh, right, sorry, forgot to start this off by saying that … Continue reading
The Pitch Perfect series is, for the most part, delightful; it’s a cliché to say that the first movie in a trilogy is the best, but Pitch Perfect really is better than Pitch Perfect 2, which mostly entertains with more bumps in the road plus a handful of unnecessary detours. So I’m not surprised that Pitch Perfect 3 turned … Continue reading
If you celebrate Christmas, you know very well that for all of its hollies and jollies, it has its share of fucking awfulness. So at Paste Magazine, I wrote a good, healthy piece about Krampus, by far one of the best Christmas horror movies, and maybe also one of the most honest Christmas movies period, of … Continue reading
Ho, ho, ho, here’s another friggin’ Star Wars article, this one about The Last Jedi‘s true menace, Poe Dameron, aka “the guy who keeps making bad decisions that get lots of Resistance members super-duper dead.” Spoiler! I guess! I hope you’ve seen the movie at this point, because if not I have way ruined it for you … Continue reading
People will probably give me degrees of flak and guff and shit for criticizing Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a) at all, and b) specifically in context with its perspectives on American race relations. Those people are wrong. This movie has as strong a grasp on racism in America as Ted Crockett has on America’s swearing in … Continue reading
I dawdled a bit posting this piece I wrote about Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Luke Skywalker, mostly* because I’m lazy. (*Entirely because I’m lazy.) But that shouldn’t give you reason to think the piece isn’t important to me. It’s actually one of the most important things I’ve written all year in the sense that … Continue reading
Maybe I’m spoiled on 2016, but I don’t know that I feel 2017 was a particularly great year for horror: Just a good year led by some new classics (a’la Get Out and It Comes at Night and Prevenge), with a handful of great to really solid efforts backing them up (Personal Shopper, It, Raw, XX, Creep 2), and also mother!, … Continue reading
I liked the musical numbers in The Greatest Showman. I liked them a lot! Like all good musical numbers, they help facilitate storytelling; they’re also bright, beautifully orchestrated, utterly joyful, and so compelling that I found myself tapping my feet through most of them. (The rest are not feet-tapping songs, which is to say that they … Continue reading
I’m not in the habit of bagging on the people I write for, and I don’t mean to do so here. That said, I wrote about Phantom Thread for The Playlist’s year-end best-of list, and of course I think it deserves to be higher than #18. At the very least it shouldn’t come before The Big Sick, … Continue reading
What a wild ride Rebecca Bunch has been on this season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend! (Really, she’s been on a wild ride for most of the show’s duration, but let’s just focus on one season at a time.) Finally, she has a firm idea of what’s “wrong” with her, which is basically my way of saying that … Continue reading
For my second piece about one of my top three favorite movies of the year, being Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant The Shape of Water, I took to the pages of The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog to talk about the element of his work that I find so compelling: His unfailing sense of wonder and awe. No … Continue reading
2017 is the year we all got out, so I’m not surprised, or disappointed, to see Jordan Peele’s astonishing horror film Get Out win top marks among my peers in the Boston Online Film Critics Association (BOFCA). Our annual awards rumpus usually spreads the love out among a number of contenders, rather than dumping it all on … Continue reading
I put down a thousand plus words about the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, Phantom Thread, in my review for The Playlist; I put down a couple hundred more in a “best of the year” blurb I put together for the same site; I will be putting down even more hundreds of words for a piece I’m … Continue reading
Color me ignorant to the love people have for The Room. Sort of, I guess. Look, I get liking crappy movies; I have gone to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show performed live in theaters and participated to extents in the rituals and customs of its live exhibitions. But I don’t necessarily qualify The Rocky Horror Picture Show … Continue reading
Hey, hey! Another month, another monthly Criterion round-up for Paste Magazine. Disclosure: We couldn’t get a blurb together for Desert Hearts, which is too bad – it’s a pretty important landmark in queer cinema – but hey, we’re not perfect. (Still: Sorry!) We got blurbs for everything else, though, including my words on Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky, which … Continue reading
Well, you can probably guess how this intro blurb is going to go. I can’t help it. Guillermo del Toro’s movies speak to me. His grasp on the language of cinema is such that his movies always hit me right in my brain-spot. (Tangential truth: I pity people who don’t vibe with his work. They’re … Continue reading
I’ll admit that documentaries aren’t necessarily my jam – it’s not that I don’t like them, it’s that the way I’m wired I tend to find more truth in fiction than in fact – but I’m happy to watch them, and happier still when they strike me the way that narrative featuresp do. So here … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 