2024
Available at Christopher Titus’ website. Full disclosure: I have seen this show live three times, from its infancy when it was called Stories I Shouldn’t Tell, where Christopher Titus was working off sheets of paper on a barstool, to its finished form under a new title: Carrying Monsters. Filmed this year at the El Portal Theatre […]
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Going willingly into You Are Not Me (original Spanish title: Tú no eres yo) is to jump straight into a basket of tension that never empties, right from the opening airport scene to the final cut to black. But you’re also signing up to stay in that basket with few chances of reprieve or payoff, as writers/directors […]
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Moana 2 is what happens when you love the idea of something but forget what made it special and meaningful. Where Moana eagerly reached out to you and made sure your hand was clutched before running away on an adventure of self-discovery, Moana 2 takes us on an odyssey into myth and legend without bothering […]
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Confession time. Let me start by saying that I have never had the opportunity to: 1) Read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. 2) See Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical stage adaptation of this novel. 3) Listen to a single recording of said musical. This review […]
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Here’s what you need to know going into Red One: It’s a Christmas movie written by Chris Morgan – scribe of the third through seventh Fast & Furious movies (and the Hobbs & Shaw spinoff) – and directed by Jake Kasdan, director of the latest Jumanji movies (and one of my personal favorites, Zero Effect). […]
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Anna Kendrick’s solid directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, is a tough, uncomfortable examination of patriarchal misogyny and sexism through the lens of actor Cheryl Bradshaw’s brief time in Hollywood. Looking for any kind of professional break, Bradshaw went on The Dating Game in 1978 and unexpectedly matched with contestant Rodney Alcala. For those who […]
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“I live in the weak and the wounded… Doc.” — Mary Hobbes This quote from Brad Anderson’s criminally underseen and underappreciated Session 9 kept coming to me throughout my viewing of Smile 2. I could almost hear Jurian Hughes’ eerily disjointed voice winding its way through my mind, especially considering the themes of trauma that […]
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I’m going to put this right up front: I’m a fan of the V/H/S anthologies, the same way I’m a massive fan of horror stories told around campfires and short horror collections, like Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark or Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew. Quick doses of horror that build to an […]
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Five years separate us from Todd Phillips’ startling Joker and a return to Gotham City in Joker: Folie à Deux. In the film’s world, only two years have passed since Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) first and only appearance on Murray Franklin’s (Robert De Niro) late-night show, a night that ended in Arthur’s imprisonment and full […]
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Now playing on YouTube. The prospect of watching fan-made media can be a double-edged sword. You never know what the story, script, production values, or acting are going to be like, as a lot of fan films are cobbled together with little more than a lot of love – and nonexistent budgets – for whatever […]
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