Subtlety in cinema has been on the chopping block for a while now. A deft edit, small asides from characters, the shot of hands that tells the audience more than half a page of dialogue ever could. These things are currently endangered by overly chatty characters, info-dump exposition, and tedious worldbuilding palaver. Not so in…

This never gets old… As we approach the end of 2023, I debated on which topic to discuss at length here. The biggest story was the dual strikes by the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild. The strikes went on for months, grinding production to a halt on everything. Several movie releases were delayed and…

When I was a wee lad, my father tells me, I fell asleep in protest of how long it was taking for the 1976 King Kong to get around to showing the monster. As I’ve grown older and matured in my cinematic tastes, I’ve come to appreciate the suspenseful restraint of classics like Jaws and…

In my annual year-in-review piece, I highlighted how many horror movies were released just in 2023 (more than eighty). As if the movie gods were listening, my first screening of 2024 was a horror movie – Night Swim. Marketed as “from the producers of M3GAN,” Night Swim follows in M3GAN’s lazy footsteps, provides a couple…

A good movie, but it is not great. In fact, it is frustrating, because you know that it could have been great.