A Deluge of Dark Water(s): The Dark Waters of Dark Waters (1944), Dark Waters (1993), Dark Water (2002), and Dark Waters (2019)
When I was a child, I thought I was surrounded by bad guys. This is not a metaphor. I had the creeping suspicion that everyone I knew—my grandma, the dentist, the children’s pastor at my church, my pre-school teachers, everybody—was…
Review| The Quarry
Scott Teems’ new film, The Quarry, strikes upon two of my deepest obsessions: southern gothic literature and music. It doesn’t have the magical realism of True Detective’s first season and it doesn’t have the grotesquery of the characters of Flannery…
The Complicated Vengeance of Hunters
Nazis! Groovy Assassins! Al Pacino! What happens when you take the motives and violence of Taranitino’s Inglourious Basterds and mix it with the revelry and twisted humor of The Boondock Saints? You get Hunters. And it’s glorious. I will keep…
The Bright Abysses of The Lighthouse (2019) & Sunshine (2007)
“And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God.” Exodus 3:6 (NKJV) The story of Moses and the burning bush has rattled my being since I was old enough to understand its nuances. An all-consuming fire…
Review| Underwater (2020)
Everything about the description and trailer of this film screams “This is like Alien, but, like, in the less vast reaches of the ocean floor!!” Even the title on the trailer calls back to the titling on Alien. Kristen Stewart’s…
Review| The Grudge (2020)
After Nicolas Pesce’s moody arthouse debut in 2016 with The Eyes of My Mother and his follow-up, Piercing—an adaptation of Japanese author Ryû Murakami’s novel, another American adaptation of the 2002 Japanese horror film, Ju-On: The Grudge seemed like an…
Watchmen (2019): Full Series Review
During the first half of the series, it would not have been odd for a viewer to assume the crux of the series’ narrative would rely mostly on the characters of Sister Night, Looking Glass, and Laurie Blake as they…
Watchmen (2019): Midpoint Review
“If no one remembers a misdeed or names it publicly, it remains invisible. To the observer, its victim is not a victim and its perpetrator is not a perpetrator; both are misperceived because the suffering of the one and the…
Review| The Lighthouse (2019)
For a while now I have been contemplating how filmmaking changed with the introduction of sound in film. The dawn of the “talkies” is an innovation that I am not at all sure we have fully come to terms with…