There’s a trend in modern moviemaking that bugs me. This is the approach that a story doesn’t need to make literal sense if it is ultimately an allegory for something else: a theme, a human condition, an illness. For instance, there are various films I’ve seen where I say, “What exactly was that monster that…

No job defines the modern era more than that of the influencer, the nebulous vocation where individuals post pictures of themselves on social media while hawking products or engaging in other questionable means of monetization. We all hate them, so you might expect a movie where an influencer is tormented and punished to be satisfying.…

Years ago I read about the Rosenhan experiment, in which a professor had his students feign insanity to get placed in an asylum. As time passed, the institutionalized students behaved normally, because they were in fact sane. They were eventually released—but only with diagnoses like “schizophrenia in remission,” rather than being recognized as sane. Unfortunately,…

The concept of the Christmas horror film is an interesting one. At first look, the holiday and the horror genres would seem to have a little in common. But it’s precisely in moments of jubilation when the shock and violence of horror can most effectively be delivered. A sub-species of Christmas horror is Santa horror,…

Film noir movies were known for their snappy patter. Why talk plainly when you can punch things up with innuendo and clever metaphors? 1946’s “The Dark Corner” is the movie to beat for great patter. It’s endless verbal jousting as characters try to one-up each other with puns and zingers. Normally I’d summarize the plot…

For the first two-thirds of this film I was like, “Meh, this is okay, I guess.” Then it hit the last act and went absolutely effing bonkers, and now I think “Death Spa” is one of the greats of American cinema. So what happens in that last act? Let me put it this way: what…

Ever start playing with a dog and think it’s gonna be so much fun and after about five minutes you’re like, “This is kind of boring.” That’s the horror film “Good Boy” in a nutshell. I hate saying it. I loved the dog actor, Indy, (though there were a lot of supposedly terrifying moments where…