Things have gone well past thinking of ending things in Blackbird, the latest from director Roger Michell. Lily doesn’t have long no matter what she does. She’s terminally ill, but instead of waiting for an unspecified expiry date she’s set one herself and gathered her family for one last get together. She’s feeling chill about it…
Welcome to 4:3 & Forgotten — a weekly column in which Rob Hunter and I get to look back at TV terrors that scared adults (and the kids they let watch) across the limited airwaves of the ’70s. This week’s movie is 1979’s The Darker Side of Terror. Some of the most effective horror films exaggerate contemporary societal…
Welcome to World Builders, our ongoing series of conversations with the most productive and thoughtful behind-the-scenes craftspeople in the industry. In this entry, we chat with cinematographer Michael Watson about balancing the unreal with the very real horrors of Lovecraft Country. You don’t have time to get comfortable. Lovecraft Country does not care if you’re…
Amazon Prime Video is the only streaming service with a cost that also gets you free shipping, and that my friends is a deal. They’re in the original programming game, but their biggest offering remains the ton of films available to watch anytime for Prime members. The complete list of new titles available to stream…
I think we can all agree that, so far, 2020 has been a whole thing. One casualty of the coronavirus is going to the cinema, and as a movie festival is pretty heavily reliant on that, I was resigned to the fact that MIFF wouldn’t happen this year. However, MIFF wasn’t going to deprive us…
Welcome to Horrorscope, a monthly column keeping horror nerds and initiates up to date on what to watch now. Here’s a guide to all the essential horror streaming in September 2020. Happy Halloween! Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonYes, that’s right, Halloween: the 61-day holiday that begins on September 1st and ends…
Hulu has been stuck in the third-place position when it comes to movie streaming behind Netflix and Amazon Prime because most people still see them strictly as a home for next-day television. They have movies, too, though, and more than a few of them are gems that make Hulu a destination beyond last night’s TV…
Streaming might be the future, but physical media is still the present. It’s also awesome, depending on the title, the label, and the release, so each week we take a look at the new Blu-rays and DVDs making their way into the world. Welcome to this week in Home Video for September 1st, 2020 which includes…
Some people spend their days arguing over the merits of Netflix, but the rest of us are too busy enjoying new movies, engaging series, and fun specials. It’s just one more way to re-watch the movies we already love and find new ones to cherish, and this month sees some of both hitting the service. The…
Welcome to 4:3 & Forgotten — a weekly column in which Kieran Fisher and I get to look back at TV terrors that scared adults (and the kids they let watch) across the limited airwaves of the ’70s. This week we head to a remote island alongside celebration, murder, and Five Desperate Women. Aaron Spelling was always best…
The name’s Bond. Bondathon. With twenty-four official James Bond films to conquer before No Time To Die hits theaters, Bond fan Anna Swanson and Bond newbie Meg Shields are diving deep on 007. Martinis shaken and beluga caviar in hand, the Double Take duo are making their way through the Bond corpus by era, so…
Streaming might be the future, but physical media is still the present. It’s also awesome, depending on the title, the label, and the release, so each week we take a look at the new Blu-rays and DVDs making their way into the world. Welcome to this week in Home Video for August 25th, 2020 which includes…
Well, we got the first day of filming in the can! I’m dong my best to remember to pull my camera up and talk to you, vlog, but there’s a lot on my plate and I’m having to drop some of the balls I’ve got going in the air, but the vlog will not be…
Ending Explained is a recurring series in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old. In this entry, we dig into the Sopranos ending and try to make sense of that shocking cut to black. In 1999, David Chase changed television forever when he introduced us…
Welcome to World Builders, our ongoing series of conversations with the most productive and thoughtful creatives in the industry. In this entry, we interview director Dean Parisot, screenwriters Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, and hear a little from Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter about the blessed, delusional optimism of Bill and Ted Face the Music. Be excellent…
In our new column Color Code, Luke Hicks chooses a handful of shots from a favorite film and analyzes them in detail to draw out the meaning behind specific colors and how they play into their scene and the film as a whole. Inspecting color is like inspecting the soul of a film. It’s an endless…
Welcome to World Builders, our new ongoing series of conversations with the most productive and thoughtful behind-the-scenes craftspeople in the industry. In this entry, we chat with She Dies Tomorrow cinematographer Jay Keitel about depicting the organic elements of dread. The end is inevitable. You, dear reader, are going to die. Sooner than you’d care to…
Welcome to How’d They Do That? — a bi-monthly column that unpacks moments of movie magic and celebrates the technical wizards who pulled them off. This entry looks into the making of The Blob. The texture of horror films in the 1980s was goop. Viscous, visceral, and virtually everywhere, slime was a cost-effective way to…
Streaming might be the future, but physical media is still the present. It’s also awesome, depending on the title, the label, and the release, so each week we take a look at the new Blu-rays and DVDs making their way into the world. Welcome to this week in Home Video for August 18th, 2020 (and August…
Welcome to Carnage Classified, a monthly column where we break down the historical and social influence of all things horror, then rank the films of each month’s category accordingly. Franchises, movements, filmmakers, sub-genres, etc…It’s all here! This entry is about folk horror films. Is there anything more horrifying than the ominous suggestion of what lurks…
The HBO Max comedy An American Pickle is about many things: intergenerational conflict; tradition versus modernity; different approaches to grieving; how much money a Brooklynite will spend on a single pickle (apparently $4). The film follows an Eastern-European Jewish immigrant who falls into a vat of pickles in 1919 and wakes up perfectly preserved a…