is a freelance critic and playwright.
Fine art photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), creeping into the haze of deep middle age, wants to go back to the old ways of doing things. He made a splash years ago with a series...
May 2, 2025
The title of David Cronenberg’s latest film resonates in myriad ways. “The Shrouds” is the name of an exclusive Toronto cemetery co-owned by inventor/entrepreneur Karsh...
April 15, 2025
Her name, brilliantly chosen, is Purificazione: Purification. Scapegoated, slut-shamed, and viciously abused, Purif is arrestingly beautiful and sexually appetizing, uneducated and intelligent.
February 17, 2025
Two young lovers travel by car through a foreign country. They quarrel, then make up, pledging their love by burying a pair of coins beneath a tree.
February 12, 2025
The year was 1838, when the entire world was permanently overcast, underlit, and draped in smoke, and everyone was unhappy and utterly humorless.
December 25, 2024
The opening images of Kaneto Shindo’s exquisite, dread-drenched, medieval Japan–set Onibaba (1964) are overlaid with...
November 15, 2024
It begins with an immense, creaking ship emerging from a silver fog and closes with an island on fire, the myriad beast-men who....
November 8, 2024
The dead-eyed political aspirant Greg Stillson in David Cronenberg’s Stephen King adaptation encapsulates Trump-level terror.
November 3, 2024
An American doctor arrives in a French village. He’s come to wed the niece of renowned local scientist Dr. Renault, but a storm forces him...
October 29, 2024
The premise alone is cinematic gold. It’s the early 21st century and Elvis (a heavily made-up Bruce Campbell) is alive, unwell, and confined...
October 25, 2024
Set in the mist-shrouded woods of Upper Austria in the 18th century, the latest film from writer/director duo...
June 28, 2024
Trouble Every Day (2001) opens with Tindersticks’ swooning, doomy song of the same name enveloping the image of two...
October 20, 2024
The premise, like the ambient air of fatalism, owes as much to film noir as it does horror. A man wakes in a place he can’t remember...
April 15, 2024
Adapted by Network scenarist Paddy Chayefsky from his only novel, Altered States (1980) is an unusual work of mainstream...
April 15, 2024
Drawing inspiration from the special bleary-eyed ambiance of vintage witching-hour television, this found-footage curio from...
March 22, 2024
A public case of professional disgrace has driven a journalist (Lily Sullivan) to hide out at her parents’ vacant, sprawling country home.
February 16, 2024
It was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) that inspired Stephanie Rothman to make movies. She studied filmmaking at...
February 12, 2024
Sweeping across centuries and continents to track the Orlando-like incarnations of its titular barbarian, French writer/director...
January 30, 2024
For all the freaky poltergeist activity and vivid visions of murder to come, The Changeling (1980) dispatches its most abysmal horrors in...
January 24, 2024
A philosophically infused coming-of-age tale and Victorian-era fantastical travelogue with overt nods to both Frankenstein and...
December 8, 2023
Hard rock and teenage hardship abound in ’80s horror relic Trick or Treat, an eternally addictive depiction of hero worship gone crazy.
October 31, 2023
The question of possession looms over The Haunting (1963), with regards to both Hill House, the labyrinthine Victorian mansion...
September 10, 2023
It is springtime 1973, and the days are bright on a small island off the coast of Cornwall. A horticulturist (Mary Woodvine), known only...
March 28, 2023
A nurse leads a catatonic through an expanse of moonlit cane. They pass displays of sacrificed animals before encountering...
March 17, 2023
We go to the movies to see ghosts, whether they be the likenesses of long-gone actors, objects, or edifices, or the suggestion of...
February 2, 2023
From its opening image of ocean waves stuttering slowly behind a sheet of steely rain to its final vista of human detritus turned into cosmic junk...
December 9, 2022
Nanny begins with Aisha (Anna Diop) asleep. Shadows, undulations, and a spreading dampness affect her bedclothes, while a spider makes...
November 21, 2022
The tale of an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) lured by seemingly amiable rural folk into a sand pit from which he is unable to escape...
October 31, 2022
The camera floats just a little behind and a little above the figure of a man running through Central Park. In this, Birth’s overture...
October 31, 2022
The English title of Christian Tafdrup’s third feature initially reads as a strategy to draw horror fans, a pleading form of genre...
September 12, 2022
The enduring allure of Southern Gothic seems inextricable from the biblical entropy that haunts its storytelling, segregating it from...
August 8, 2022
Cronenberg hallmarks may ripple through Crimes of the Future, but the director’s transcendent return offers fresh flavors of food for thought.
June 7, 2022
I haven’t seen Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, a 2018 documentary entitled A Self-Induced Hallucination.
April 20, 2022
Brazilian writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s debut feature begins with the whole of humanity being forced indoors by a pervasive vapor as deadly...
March 1, 2022
Produced during the cultural thaw that immediately followed the end of the Franco dictatorship, Basque writer/director...
October 31, 2021
Brazilian writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s debut feature begins with the whole of humanity being forced indoors by a pervasive vapor as deadly...
March 1, 2022
is a writer, photographer, videographer, and cinephile living in Portland, Oregon.
