Recently, I was inspired by the unveiling of the Variety list of the 100 best horror movies. I was curious why the list had been received with trepidation. To sum up the post, my conclusion was that Variety included a number of older movies which rely more on atmosphere than gore or jump scares, and… Read More Which Movies Make Up the Horror Canon?
For those of you coming to the discourse a little late, let’s summarize some of the little reasons why people got mad at the Variety list. (The list was put together by Siddhant Adlakha, Peter Debruge, William Earl, Owen Gleiberman, Courtney Howard, Tomris Laffly, Amy Nicholson, and Rene Rodriguez. I wish that they, as Slant… Read More The Variety 100 Best Horror Movies – Whose Horror Is It Anyway?
Dir. Marc Webb. Starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx Every movie adaptation of the Batman story has to cope with the Joker in the same way that whenever Poochie’s not on screen, the other characters should be asking, “Where’s Poochie?” “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” doesn’t cast quite as long a shadow as Poochie… Read More The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Starring Shirley Jones, Gordan MacRae, Charlotte Greenwood The year is 1955, the year of Kismet and Rebel without a Cause. The black-and-white musical is dead. The model of 42nd Street is crumbling around the feet of The Band Wagon. The three M’s (that’s “Method,” “Meisner,” and “Miller”) are coming to symbolize the… Read More Oklahoma! (1955)
From @JFrankensteiner, one of the leading lights of Film Twitter, the guy who popularized “Jimmy Carter: Letterboxd President.” This has over six million views on Twitter and more than 100,000 likes. Is it hyperbole? Is this, in fact, the worst filmography you’re liable to see in your life? As ever, I am still just one… Read More Who Has the Worst Filmography of All Time?
Dir. Richard Thorpe. Starring Esther Williams, Jimmy Durante, Peter Lawford It’s not a hard and fast rule. Exceptions include movies like Blazing Saddles, the Monty Python films, Once Upon a Time in America. But when I see four separate writers credited for a screenplay I get nervous. It’s romantic to think that when only one… Read More On an Island with You (1948)
Dir. Jonathan Glazer. Starring Christian Friedel, Sandra Huller, Julia Polaczak The United Kingdom took home its first ever victory in the International Feature Film category at the Oscars, the third nominee for a country which had sent two Welsh-language nominees up in the ’90s. This movie is in German, which is unusual, to say the… Read More The Zone of Interest (2023)
My new hobby is Marvel United, and if you’re here, you either a) don’t need me to explain this game to you or b) you’re liable to read whatever I write anyway, bless you. Since it’s a new hobby, it’s got a huge slice of my brain. In the spirit of Marvel stuff: A few… Read More Marvel United Season 1 and 2 (and Spider-Geddon!) Character Rankings
At the 96th Academy Awards, Diane Warren failed to win Best Original Song for the fifteenth time in fifteen tries. Shockingly, “The Fire Inside,” written for the movie about the guy who did not in fact come up with the idea for hot Cheetos, did not win. On the other hand, I’m willing to wager… Read More The Warren Index: Will They Win a Competitive Oscar Before Diane Warren?
Terence Davies died and it broke my heart. He was a month shy of his seventy-eighth birthday. In the final decade of his filmmaking career, he made four films: The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song, A Quiet Passion, and, all too appropriately, Benediction. With apologies to what he had done from the early 1980s and… Read More Did Terence Davies See Killers of the Flower Moon?
Seeing Things Secondhand 