Though Tron: Legacy was not a sterling piece of cinema, its gorgeous visuals and a banging score from Daft Punk made it an enjoyable update to the original 1982 cult classic. The movie tried to strike a healthy balance between nostalgic fan service and novel riffs on the source material to make itself feel like […]
There is a certain degree of body horror baked into American football that becomes readily apparent whenever players sustain gruesome, career-ending injuries on camera. For some, football’s overt violence is part of its appeal, and players are seen as people who have chosen to risk their safety in pursuit of fame and glory. Over the […]
It’s been almost exactly a year since I first saw Megalopolis, and the last 12 months haven’t been kind to Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating epic. It mostly bewildered critics and audiences, earned back just a fraction of its $120 million budget, and still isn’t easily accessible via streaming or a Blu-ray release. Megalopolis is a […]
When Stephen King’s The Long Walk was first published in 1979, dystopian young adult fiction had not yet become a wildly popular genre. With all of its gore and brutality, King’s novel wasn’t really meant for children. But in the book’s story about disillusioned youths being made to march through wastelands as a form of […]
Frankenstein is one of those stories that’s been retold countless times. And yet, Guillermo del Toro has managed to make a version that not only feels true to Mary Shelley’s original, but is also imbued with the trademarks the director is known for. Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising – when presenting the film at […]
The best part of going to a film festival is finding something new. Sure, it’s great to find out that movies you’re excited about are in fact good – I’ve had luck so far with Exit 8, No Other Choice, and Wake Up Dead Man – but it’s so much more exciting to be surprised […]
When director Rian Johnson introduced the new Knives Out film on the third day of TIFF 2025, he exclaimed: “we’re going back to church.” By that he meant that Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Benoit Blanc mystery, would harken back to the origins of the whodunit, and in particular the gothic vibes of Edgar […]
At my second day at TIFF 2025, the longest line I saw wasn’t for a movie: it was for the Criterion Closet. The space is housed in a van so that it could make it up to Toronto, and honestly, it felt a little wrong to see the outside of it after watching everyone from […]
Greetings from Toronto, Canada! I’m braving long lines and busy streets for the next week or so to attend the Toronto International Film Festival, better known as TIFF, and I’m planning to take you all along with me. Each day I’ll be publishing a dispatch covering my time at the festival, including thoughts on every […]
Zach Cregger’s first major film Barbarian was tense and frightening, but it was also infused with a healthy dose of absurdity. The movie’s twisted sense of humor made it easier to stomach its grotesque violence and a bit more difficult to anticipate how its unhinged story would unfold. But Barbarian also worked surprisingly well as […]