is a freelance critic and playwright.
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 in which most of the action takes place, and the film’s story...
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 as the volunteer, is the island’s sole inhabitant.
March 28, 2023
A nurse leads a catatonic through an expanse of moonlit cane. They pass displays of sacrificed animals before encountering the towering, shirtless, dead-eyed Black man...
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 specters imprinted in the gloom of otherwise benign images.
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, Nr. 10 seems determined above all...
December 9, 2022
Nanny begins with Aisha (Anna Diop) asleep. Shadows, undulations, and a spreading dampness affect her bedclothes, while a spider...
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. The film’s IMDb page offers a teasingly terse synopsis: “It’s about the internet...
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 as it is seemingly innocuous.
March 1, 2022
Produced during the cultural thaw that immediately followed the end of the Franco dictatorship, Basque writer-director and designer Iván Zulueta’s 1979 feature Arrebato (Rapture)...
October 31, 2021
is a writer, photographer, videographer, and cinephile living in Portland, Oregon.