Look: I fucking despised Ari Aster’s Hereditary. I don’t care whose movie it’s supposed to be, or whose perspective we’re supposed to take*, or how the movie sets up its climactic reveals. It’s never what a movie is about that’s a problem. It’s how it’s about it. Hereditary, one of the most misleadingly named movies … Continue reading
You’re locked inside, the movies you want to see aren’t getting VOD releases, and you’ve probably watched the ones that have. Maybe try something way off your radar next! Continue reading
Unspeakable horror! Mutant nightmares! Eldritch evil! Alexandrian witchcraft! Nicolas Cage gleefully picking tomatoes and peaches off of the vine! Continue reading
Andy absolutely will not shut up about how bad “Hereditary” is until you agree that “Hereditary” is bad. Continue reading
For those of you who are not yet sick to the point of barfing from hearing Andy kvetch and piss and moan about how bad “Hereditary” is…here’s another piece where Andy kvetches and pisses and moans about how bad “Hereditary” is. Continue reading
Well: We did it. It’s not often that a critics group’s awards match up closely with my own feelings, and if I’m being really nitpicky, this year’s Boston Online Film Critics Association awards miss a few marks for me; if you know me well and you’ve followed this blog since I started bitching about a certain … Continue reading
Well, you can’t win ’em all. Thought exercise: Even if I did like Suspiria and Hereditary (they’re bad), I’d probably put Mandy ahead of them both. Mandy is a distinct horror throwback, but the film feels current, of the moment, a time capsule for reviewing its era sans wistful nostalgia, and it frankly stands to move the genre forward in … Continue reading
I suspect, by now, that a number of those of you reading my work and my Twitter feed are just about sick of hearing me complain about Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Well…I’m going to complain about it a couple times more, though in this instance, we’re talking less about a complaint than a comparison. If you’re going to make … Continue reading
Upfront: Questions like these, at face value, don’t have good answers, because we can never know with 100% certainty what those answers might be. That said, I think horror, at least “horror” that does not satisfy the genre’s growing prestige among critics and check respectability boxes, is on a sort of decline among tastemakers, and … Continue reading
It’s June. “Best Of (So Far)” list time. About a third of the blurbs on Paste Magazine‘s June ’18 list have my name on them, and of those that don’t, there are a handful I don’t agree with: I think Avengers: Infinity War is an exhausting slog, How to Talk to Girls at Parties is garbage, and Hereditary … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 