Before listening to The Storage Papers, I never thought a podcast could scare me as much as The Magnus Archives. That the mind-melting, the dark-is-dangerous thrill it gave me was the peak of horror storytelling.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is the type of movie that could only exist in this new media environment. The draw is the spectacle of connecting reboots and pulling in actors to reprise long-gone roles.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife has several excellent moments, a great protagonist, and a heartfelt core, yet is underwhelming in a lot of ways. Those who watch it will remember it mainly for its fan service, and though that’s kind of the point—it’s not great we have a lot of movies made with that in mind.
My reviewing of Turning Red has to, by the sheer presence of its theming, contain caveats. It’s a movie that has a heavy focus on periods and mother-daughter conflicts during adolescence. As an adult male reviewer, it’s not my place to speculate on how true to life this movie is. I’ve simply not grown up as a teenage girl.
Given recent movie adaptation trends, Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark has a lot of comparisons. Even attempting to evaluate it outside of context is semi-impossible because of its similarities.
Encanto is peak cinema. That’s a hot take, but it’s hard to argue against a movie made with this level of care, skill, and storytelling effort.
The House is an interpretive art piece. The creators had a point to make, and a message to send—but I’ve yet to figure out what that message was.
Watching The Wheel of Time is a real-time game of deciding whether the show will do something cool, or rote and overplayed.
I’d not read anything by T. Kingfisher before this novel, but given the grace of the prose, The Hollow Places will not be the last. She’s shown her sureness within both this subgenre and in the art of simply telling a good story.
To call Circle an intense film is to undersell it. Utilizing almost only a single location, this death game story touches upon politics, human nature, mercy, and bigotry. It uses a very simple premise and plays it straight and is one of the best-paced films I’ve seen in a long time.
Calling Harrow Lake a disappointment is perhaps too strong a phrase, but the book does fail to deliver in a few key aspects. There was a missing ingredient, a piece withheld, that made it appear mismanaged.
Horrid is a book about emotions more than anything else. Its plot, its ending, its momentum are all in service of getting across big emotional moments.
