horror films
Movie Review: Frankenstein
4.5 stars out of 5 Guillermo del Toro has quietly become one of my favorite filmmakers. This is his fourth consecutive movie (after The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinnochio) that I’ve rated 4.5 stars out of 5, and Pan’s Labyrinth is a classic as well. And via interviews, I’ve learned […]
Movie Review: The Conjuring — Last Rites
3.5 stars out of 5If you’re keeping score: First I watched The Conjuring, The Conjuring 2, Annabelle Comes Home, and Annabelle: Creation on cable. In 2021, I went to the theater to see The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Since then on cable I’ve watched Annabelle and The Nun. I returned to the […]
Movie Review: The Shrouds
4 stars out of 5In 2022, I gave a positive review to Crimes of the Future, written and directed by the then-79-year-old David Cronenberg. Showing that the apple doesn’t fall far from the fucked-up tree, I gave an equally positive review to 43-year-old son Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool. Ah, but the senior Croney wasn’t quite […]
Movie Review: Sinners
4.5 stars out of 5 Coogler and Jordan are a dream team: Fruitville Station, Creed, and, my people are telling me that Michael B. Jordan was also in Black Panther. So when I saw they teamed up once again for Sinners, I knew I’d see the movie right away. And I did; it just took […]
Movie Review: Wolf Man
4 stars out of 5 The day started out with me planning to see the movie September 5 in Montclair. But for the second week in a row I didn’t get an early-enough jump, so hunkered down in Vito’s Pizza of Bloomfield (last week it was the Tick Tock Diner in Clifton) to figure out […]
Movie Review: Smile 2
4 stars out of 5 I was slightly skeptical about this sequel, knowing Sosie Bacon could not reprise her lead role. But noticing that writer/director Parker Finn was back, and having enjoyed the first installment so much, I didn’t stay away long from Smile 2. Plus it’s spooky movie season! Plot, you want to hear […]
Movie Review: The First Omen
4 stars out of 5 The Exorcist came out when I was 4 years old, followed by The Omen when I was 7. These movies seemed to be mentioned quite a lot during my childhood. Sure, I had my little ghost stories and such, but there seemed to be some truly scary stuff out there […]
Movie Review: Infinity Pool
4 stars out of 5I can imagine Mike White handing this in as a stand-alone episode of White Lotus and getting immediately fired and banned by HBO. In Infinity Pool, writer/director Brandon Cronenberg gives us his own version of an existentially bored couple at a tropic resort, but because of that last name, you can […]
Movie Review: Smile
4 stars out of 5Sosie Bacon was wonderfully messed up as the junkie birth mom in Mare of Easttown, and she radiated warmth as the caretaker of autistic young adults in As We See It. Here, in Smile, she gets to do both — though admittedly a lot more of the screwed up stuff. You’ve […]
Movie Review: Barbarian
4 stars out of 5On September 10, 2001, my buddy Terry and I went to see the pretty decent horror flick Jeepers Creepers which starred Justin Long. (He’ll always be Ed’s Warren Cheswick to me.) A couple of things have happened personally and globally since back then, yet on September 13, 2021, I found myself […]
Jack Silbert, curator