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Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

First, some housekeeping: This movie is called Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, BUT the SpaceGodzilla in question is covered in large crystals spread all over his body, including some Mad Max-style Crystal shoulder pads, which is fucking awesome. He’s like a flying jewellery post-apocalypse fantasy monster and I adore him. I sincerely believe that Toho fumbled the bag by not referring to Godzilla’s nemesis in this film as “Crystal Godzilla”. As the lone protester in the world’s stupidest protest, I will not be referring to this monster as “Space Godzilla”. I will be calling him Crystal Godzilla for the entire duration of this essay. With that being said, let’s begin.

For a brief and wonderful time in 1978, Nobuhiko Obayashi was in talks to direct a new Godzilla film for Toho. The idea that Obayashi had in mind was an intergalactic one that would have re-written Godzilla’s origins, reconsidered the King of all Monsters in the lens of outright fantasy, and finally, given him a change of gender. Obayashi’s Godzilla was going to wash up on the shores of the Pacific ocean in the United States, and would be in dire need of transportation back to her home planet, after it is revealed that she is pregnant. The second half of the film would have taken place entirely on a planet of Godzilla-like creatures, while Rozan (Godzilla’s name in this incarnation) raised her daughter Lilith with her husband Kunin. The third act was devoted to an attack on the Godzilla home-world by a group of alien-human hybrid creatures named the Sunerians. This would have been Obayashi’s follow-up to House (1977), and would have certainly been one of the most unique Godzilla movies in the canon. Given Obayashi’s career-long interest in deconstructing the state of Japan after World War II, it would have likely also been thematically coherent with Ishiro Honda’s original vision of Godzilla as a response to the use of nuclear weaponry. Alas, the film never came to be, but was re-interpreted in the form of a comic book that was illustrated in part by Katsuhiro Otomo before he became famous for Akira. Godzilla would never really go to space in the way that Obayashi imagined, but Toho would frequently look to outer space for other monsters to battle their mascot.

When Crystal Godzilla makes his presence known, it seems as though the filmmakers involved have finally become woke to the joys of anime. He lands in Fukuoka in a hail of dust, emanating energy off of his shimmering, diamond encrusted body, and the camera pans up from toe to his purple-jeweled mohawk. It evokes a badass energy that immediately underlines this monster as a significant threat. It’s like something out of Dragonball Z and it is deeply pleasurable in a bone-headed way. Koichi Kawakita is back once again as the special effects director, and his wider frames, trademark sliding dolly shots, and generous usage of POV remains effective in communicating scale and the fantastical elements of these creatures. Initially, this film opts for a straight-forward revenge tale when Crystal Godzilla kidnaps Baby Godzilla (who has been given the traditional “Chibi” qualities of a chubby belly and enormous cat eyes). The following string of close-ups in this showdown between Crystal Godzilla, Godzilla and Baby is like something one might imagine Sergio Leone conceiving if he were hallucinating. It’s meant to recall Ripley’s confrontation with the Xenomorph in James Cameron’s Aliens, when she utters her classic line, “get away from her you bitch!”, but communicated entirely through the stern glace of Godzilla. These movies routinely get slotted into the category of camp, and in many cases, I would disagree, but not in this particular instance. The story that’s unfolding here is tragically ludicrous, to quote a certain camp icon on his legendary appearance on The Simpsons. For a moment, this film is everything that I want from the increasingly convoluted and serialized Heisei-era of Godzilla, but it’s only this way for a single scene. We soon lose track of Chibi Godzilla’s kidnapping and Godzilla’s motivations, and get stuck inside the swamp of inter-connected plots revolving around human characters.

Full essay over here

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Jonathan Glazer’s visual style comes into focus on the “Karma Police” music video that he directed for Radiohead. In that video, a camera was placed behind the driver’s seat as a car lurched forward on an abandoned road, during the darkest hours of the night, with the headlights carving up midnight in pursuit of someone or something. The car moves along for quite a while until there’s a glimmering mothlight gleaming ahead steadily transforming into the shape of a man. Glazer is captivated by the shape of blank spaces, and he’s very sure about images that lack clear definition. At heart, he’s best suited for the avant-garde, but he began in commercials and music videos, and he’s never completely abandoned the populism of the forms where he began. This has resulted in him straddling both the art world and the mainstream cinema to the surreal effect of having his experimental film about the Jewish concentration camp at Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest, being available at the multiplex at the same time as superhero movies and Disney animations. In addition to having obvious avant-garde sensibilities, he is also beholden to horror filmmaking, without being a director who cherishes the genre, or has much interest in what that visual language might entail. He’s closer to Michael Haneke or Stanley Kubrick than he is John Carpenter or Dario Argento, and the effect of his unfaithful adaptation of Michael Faber’s “Under the Skin” had a profound effect on the genre moving forward. It was the first a24 horror film, and beckoned an era where the expressive qualities of horror became internalized through the traumatic emotions of characters, rather than the external properties of gore, violence and death. Under the Skin remains the high-watermark for this type of horror film from this era.

Under the Skin begins with a pinhole camera trick where the entire lens is covered except for a dot of light in the center of the frame. It’s a technique that recalls the first magicians of silent short films, and endows the opening with the effect of a simultaneous creation meant to evoke a Genesis of the female Alien’s birth, and for the perspective of the viewer who is learning how to watch the movie in real time. The fragment of light creates an optical illusion that makes the viewer feel as though they are being pulled into it, and that the light itself is getting bigger, but it isn’t. It recalls the man up-ahead in the “Karma Police” music video, but without the resolution of arriving at the destination that our eyes seem to be travelling. In the distance, a voice can be heard mimicking human language, and stumbling around phrases. Glazer abandons the pinhole, but there’s hardly any relief to be found for the eye in the following empty space that has been conjured. In a blinding white void, with no depth of field, or recognizable objectivity to speak of, an alien in the shape of a beautiful woman (Scarlett Johansson) strips a human woman of her clothing. It’s odd, like a game of dress-up from an oblique angle that doesn’t make any rational sense. There isn’t any characterization given to this abducted woman, save for a lone tear that falls down her expressionless face. The stilted emotion of this living corpse breaks the illusion of the scene a little. Glazer is better the less that he insists upon meaning. But what follows is a procedural style observance of the alien getting dressed, and it pulls the film back into the rigorous confines of its distanced mode of communication. Her black heels, her dewy thighs in silhouette, the leather jacket that’s a size-too-small on Johansson’s frame, recalls Glazer’s fashionable commerciality, but the strange way that these images are positioned alongside of one another embodies an otherwise remote mise-en-scene. This conflict that surfaces here for the first time, between the distance of her actions, and the empathetic subjectivity of the alien’s body, is the element which reveals a reservoir of startling depth at an emotional and psychological level, in addition to the form, which makes Under the Skin more than just a movie about a predator transforming into prey.

Full essay over here

Watched on Tuesday May 13, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Robert Ciupka thought it was time to try out feature-film directing after he had gotten a taste of big time movie-making while shooting Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980), which starred Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon. The Canadian DoP had spent his time in filmmaking up to that point shooting charming local pictures like The Mystery of the Million Dollar Hockey Puck (1975), and bottom-of-the-barrel work-for-hire exploitation like Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia (1977). Working with a major director like Malle helped hone his instincts as a cinematographer, and he imagined his first movie—a mid-budget horror film produced by Peter Simpson, who was coming off the success of the Jamie Lee Curtis starring slasher film Prom Night—as a giallo-inspired, very European picture. Simpson had no expectations of art, envisioning a meat-and-potatoes stalk and kill movie that resembled the other popular films of the budding subgenre. They would be in great conflict with one another all throughout the multi-year production of the film that would become Curtains, resulting in Ciupka abandoning the project mid-way through the shoot due to creative differences, and asking that his name be removed from the movie. Around forty-five to fifty minutes of the ninety minute film belong to Ciupka, with Simpson taking over duties for the remainder of the shoot. There has been some disagreement over who shot what, after the film became a cult object with a sizable fan-base, and the troubled production meant that this movie is a little uneven by nature. The disparate philosophies that Ciupka and Simpson had for this movie are both visible in the final cut, and the incoherent qualities of their two warring visions have accidentally resulted in a film about fraying troubled identities, feeling more cut up and put back together than it would have if not for their issues. The final card reads “Directed by Jonathan Stryker”, the same name as the film director that veteran actor John Vernon plays in this story, and it’s a sly meta-textual element in a film that gradually inhabits the strange liminal space of half-made, disaster movies that feel more alive, because of their flaws

Samantha Sherwood is feeling the currents change as an actress in her forties. She’s a Joan Crawford type played by Samatha Eggar (whom most audiences recognize as the lead in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), and she’s preparing a new film project with her director Jonathan Stryker about a mentally disturbed woman named Audra. Sherwood is a method actress, and it is implied that she used to work in the good old days of the motion picture business, before television made a mess of the easily gleaned differences between art and commercialism. She and Stryker have hatched a fool-proof plan for her to prepare for this career-rejuvenating role: feign a mental break and be ordered into a mental institution for a period of months, but Stryker plans on leaving her there, and auditioning six younger women for the lead role. The ages within the mental institution have the oft-kilter fish-eyeisms of the uncomfortable British film The Other Side of the Underneath, but do not break the faux-art house sheen that Jane Arden’s film does, and through it all, Eggar carries it with increased dishevellment. Eggar has always been an entrancing beauty, with lovely crimson hair and deep blue eyes, but she has a trick up her sleeve that makes her body language flirt with the avant-garde. Her eyes do not entirely match—she’s like David Bowie in this respect—with one eye being slightly bigger than the other, and she exploits this element of herself whenever she needs to go beyond normal human behaviour. She’ll need to do just that when she escapes the mental institution with revenge on her mind.

Full essay over here

Watched on Wednesday May 7, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 8, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 7, 2025.

You'll never believe it, but this is another fun Russ Meyer film about boobs. HOWEVER, in one case, the boobs are deployed in a way that is a direct homage to the structuring technique of Orson Welles's all-knowing magician in F For Fake.

Marina de Van understands that there is something fundamentally strange about being a woman, and that this destabilized effect stems from the lack of a clear, definitive agency within a personal feminine identity. The sense of control that her characters may or may not feel is directly foregrounded through their behaviour, and her cinema is especially appealing to me for this reason. For Jeanne, her sense of herself has suddenly capsized when she begins to see this other woman in the mirror. She rightly wonders if this transformation that seems to be occurring in her life is the birth of her true identity that was bound up in all those memories of childhood that she doesn’t have. It begs the question: “Who is the real Jeanne?”. There’s some Jekyll and Hyde special effects where Marceau can be seen transforming into Bellucci in real time that haven’t aged very well, but the fallout, primarily acted by Bellucci occupying the role of Jeanne, is both exciting and upsetting. Jeanne has not undergone a death of her own identity, but everyone around her seems to her in this new form that she has taken. De Van is pulled to images of scar-tissue and fixates on the Bellucci version of Jeanne now having indentations from a previous accident mapped all up and down her leg. Bellucci walks with a limp, and plays her role with more embodiment than Marceau, which gives off the odd feeling that this life is hers, and not the woman we had grown to learn about in the first half of the film.

I'm launching a new once-a-month series on my patreon called "Auteurist Oddities" where I'll be looking at strange films made by prominent directors.
Full Essay Here

Watched on Monday May 5, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 3, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 5, 2025.

I don't know if I've ever seen a more severe depiction of the gender binary in film. Hilariously stressful movie that really shouldn't work, but there's a madhouse energy here that culminates in an ending that contains one of the more absurdly punishing punchlines I've seen in some time. This is a movie that's always saying "...and more." to each and every scenario and character. I was very entertained and I did dream that Richard Gere was my gynecologist last night. That's telling me something...I guess?

Watched on Friday May 2, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 1, 2025.

David Cronenberg has said on numerous occasions throughout the press tour for The Shrouds, that after his wife of many decades ed away, he was overcome with the urge to crawl into the coffin with her. Cronenberg has been disarmingly honest about the shape of his grief when talking about this movie, and the opening shot of The Shrouds contains that same forthright quality. The still beautiful, feminine corpse of Becca (Diane Kruger) is framed dimly, and with the robust avant-garde imagination of a wide-angle below ground. There’s a visible hole in the background of the shot, for any visitor to gaze her rotting body in real time. Her husband Karsh (Vincent Cassel) gazes at her with an intense longing, and the distance between them seems like that of a sailor peering out of a porthole at the unwelcome sea. Cronenberg’s films are usually more emotionally distant than the zoom which comes next, reaching ever closer to Karsh’s screaming mouth in close-up, before a seamless match-cut transforms the scene into that of a dentist poking Karsh’s molar with the scrape of a scalpel. He tells Karsh that grief is rotting his teeth. It’s a really funny place for this scene to land, and it’s emblematic of the tone that this genre-less odyssey of a motion picture (Cronenberg’s longest) takes the viewer. Karsh’s dental technician then asks him if he wants JPEG’s of Becca’s dental records. “Anything to help”. Another dry joke, but a revealing one.

Karsh is the founder of GraveTech, and in the wake of his grief, he has invented a new technology, which allows the bereaved to check up on their buried loved-ones via an app attached to a burial shroud that also acts as a high-res, 8k camera. The technology is not especially different from that of an X-ray, but its implications have raised criticism about its ethical, environmental and political possibilites. These concerns coalesce in the defacing of a GraveTech cemetery—the same one that houses Becca—and Karsh is left to wonder about the cause of this action, and whether or not it has anything to do with his observation that Becca’s skeleton seems to be growing nodules that weren’t there a few years ago. It’s been four years since Becca’s ing, but Karsh still pilfers with the image of her dead body on his phone—a kind of technological necrophilia—and he has become increasingly paranoid since her ing. His sister-in-law Terry (also Diane Kruger, this time with short, red hair, instead of Becca’s blonde waves), doesn’t help matters when she regales Karsh with her own belief that the medical community tested out experimental procedures on Becca when she was dying of cancer. Karsh is especially prone to these delusional fantasies, and the brilliance of the film lies in the fact that there is just enough believable information that the audience also begins to wonder what is and isn’t true, imbuing us with our own paranoia over the validity of what we are seeing.

Full review over here. Probably my favorite film of 2025 so far.

Watched on Wednesday April 30, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 28, 2025.

The wide-open spaces of Wyoming are a contradiction. They promise a freedom that only taunts these lovelorn cowboys. Ang Lee and DoP Rodrigo Prieto become hypnotized by the natural beauty of the setting, capturing all manner of dewy, bruised skylines of the rising and setting sun. Filming the natural world is traditional to the best of Western storytelling, and the Edenic imagery is used as a both a counter-point and a provocation. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar take a summer gig as work-for-hire sheep farmers for Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) up on Brokeback Mountain. The first hour of the film chronicles how they spent their quiet hours up there, and what begins as solitary work, transforms into flashes of how their intimacy grew considerably over time. They are seen diving off a cliffside together in the nude, chasing one another with boyish glee around a campfire, and on one cold night, careening up the anal cave of Twist, and finding ecstasy like none other. Their paradise has to be the adhesive that carries the film in its final hour, and its well observed in its potentially dangerous proclivity, and the unrelenting joy that their sexual encounters bring both men. Throughout, the seams show here and there, fist fights, slaughtered sheep by the wolf of their negligence. They can sense the hourglass running dry, and they talk about what they must do with this problem of wrong love. Jack has eager visions of cohabitating together on a ranch up where his father lives, but Ennis has too much fear in his heart to take that leap. If they had ranched together it’s hard to say if they would last beyond the initial excitement of sex, and their sporadic reunions trying to chase the fire they had on Brokeback. But the magnetic pull between Gyllenhaal and Ledger as these characters strongly implies that it would have been worth trying.

Full essay over here

Depictions of transness can sometimes be so weighed down by political and social urgency that it is difficult for a film to get out from underneath the weight of proper presentation. Director Henry Hanson is exploiting the facts of that understanding to chart a path forward in pursuit of great trans comedy. Hanson and the crew of actors who improvised their dialogue in their newest film Dog Movie, understand that some of the funniest, most provocative comedy is produced through discomfort. On these , because god knows our lives are often uncomfortable, one would think that there must be thousands of great comic trans films and performances, but it’s not a robust area of our depiction. There’s films starring Holly Woodlawn and her Warholian co-stars Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis, there’s the strange mid-aughts farceThe Plug Lady, and more recently, pictures like The People’s Joker and Computer Hearts, to name a few. In Dog Movie, Hason shows us a ive-aggressive tenderqueer couple in Arrow (Marten Katze) and Haven (Jessie Gaston) meeting their own worst nightmare: a hanger-on housemate friend named Bloo (Milo Talwani), who they desperately want to kick out of their home, but are terrified of offending them in the process. Things come to a head when they adopt an elderly dog, who is also named Blue.

They prefer their canine compatriot to their human one, and the crew get a lot of mileage out of the joke that the dog, and their difficult housemate have the same name. This coincidence immediately causes Bloo to think poorly of the dog. They’ve fought for their name right? It’s the most basic area of dignity to call a trans person by their chosen moniker, but Blue is so old that he won’t respond to a new name, and Bloo seems to have more than a little Bjork in their spirit and goes only by one name and refuses to be called anything else. They settle on calling them Dog Blue and Human Bloo. More to the point of the Bjork-isms, Bloo spends most of their days plunking away at a ukulele making avant-garde music. They’ve nested in the corner of their living space, and frequently walk around in the nude. When Arrow and Haven ask Bloo to take the dog for walks while they are working at their jobs, Bloo behaves like it is a great imposition on their quality of life. Their problem coincides with many in-community punchlines, my favorite of them being a grainy shot of Haven reading a paperback copy of “Conflict is Not Abuse” in their bed.

Hanson’s eye for characters is lusciously gentle, and very good at capturing the minutiae of their dynamics and traits. There aren’t many aesthetic leaps, but a controlled, determined sense of mood and pace, which enlivens the comedy. The dynamics between these four characters (the dog gets all of the best close-ups) are reminiscent of workplace comedies, or some of the faux mockumentary realism of Christopher Guest movies like Waiting for Guffman. The fact that Bloo frequently interrupts their work from home job with music, weed, and probing questions about what they’re doing, only increases the claustrophobic effect of this household menace. However, Hanson doesn’t treat Bloo like a monster either with broad strokes of obvious malice or slapstick…they’re just kind of a fuck-up, and we need more trans fuck-ups onscreen. We all know one. We all love one. We all root for one to get their shit together. Bloo isn’t evil, but their behavior and mistakes accumulate into some deeply uncomfortable moments of comedy. When Arrow and Haven go out for a night on the town, and ask Human Bloo to feed Dog Blue his old doggy pills, and take him for a walk so he can have a bowel movement, the audience understands that Bloo will fail, and the inevitable punchline will come exactly as we expect it to. This isn’t a problem, but an understanding of good comic structure. Dog Movie has many well understood moments such as these, and even if it’s hour long run time is stretched to the breaking point, it can occasionally feel nice living with these characters who are going to feel familiar to any trans person watching this film, even if we’d never ever want to live with these people for more than 55 minutes.

Dog Movie is now available on VOD through Muscle Distribution

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Cronenberg is literally so funny. Lea Seydoux is over here giving Viggo oral in his zipper stomach pussy and he's moaning, "make sure I don't spill.".

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 24, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 23, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

The first 10 minutes of this involve a little girl taking a gondola on a very foggy day through a strangely deserted Venice. No dialogue is spoken. Just an eerie calm as we watch her go *somewhere*. When she arrives at her destination, after all this buildup, she promptly walks into the bathroom where her mother is taking a bath and she tosses a hairdryer into the tub killing her instantly. It's such a collision of good taste and bad that I couldn't help but ire its strange contrast. Cozzi continues to do his best Roeg, and Argento impressions, but the driving force of this oddball MTV-style slasher is surely the imagination of Daria Nicolodi, whose feminine witchery always brought about curious images. There are plenty here.

It’s pleasurable to watch a filmmaker as patient and confident as Ryan Coogler. This has become an increasingly rare quality for a mainstream American filmmaker, and rarer, is the sense that he is adding to the canvas of his past films with each new one that he makes. His body of work is idiosyncratic, despite being populist, and his reservations about that popularity, and the system in which that “success” is perceived, is creating contradictions in his art that is deepening the stories he wishes to tell. Sinners is a Jim Crow-era vampire slayer picture set in 1932, but it’s also about the blues, about gentrification of black art, and about attempting to build communities in unsustainable places. All of Coogler’s movies have been in dialogue with that last element. Smoke and Stack are identical twins played by Michael B. Jordan, and they’ve moved back to the Mississippi Delta to open a “Juke t” for the folks whose lives are still dictated by the shadow slavery of the pre-civil war era. They’re both World War I veterans who made their trade in Chicago, but they’ve fled the windy city after playing the Italian and Irish mobs against one another. Fleeing with a bounty of illegal liquor. They’re looking to build something for the future by living proudly in the present. Sinners chronicles roughly twenty-four hours in their lives, and Stack would say it was the best day of his life.

Coogler has a real skill for producing relationships, characters and places, which feel natural. His films float along the finer details of the circumstances which bring those elements to life, and this makes him a good fit for a horror-adjacent character piece such as this one. There is an ethos of making the viewer care about the character in horror filmmaking that many of the great directors of that genre, such as George A. Romero, John Carpenter and Rob Zombie believe in, and Coogler fits the mold of that idea. While watching Sinners, I was reminded of the bustling, sexy, and very alive detours of Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress, as Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington), goes about his day seeing all sorts of people, and going to all sorts of places, as a makeshift private investigator. The Twins move around the plantation and the town in much the same way, and Coogler has a Jonathan Demme-esque vision of people, where it seems like if the movie were to shift gears and follow a brand new character it wouldn’t hurt the film at all.

Full review over here

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Every movie that came out in 2020 has a cursed energy, but this still fucking rips.

It's ordinariness gets close to something profound. And you could say that's about baseball, that's about aging, that's about time, that's about life, but It never pins itself down to any of those things. It keeps almost stating what it's about, but manages to remain evasive due to the ambiance of natural noise around the park and conversations among these ball players being cut off due to the rhythm of the game moving forward. While I was watching this, I thought about how it's theoretically possible for a baseball game to never end, and the longer this game goes on the better the film becomes. When the sun goes down this becomes like a Baseball version of Goodbye Dragon Inn for an inning or two.

Cronenberg usually works from the inside and goes outward, but A History of Violence takes the long road to interiority. Beginning with the community, and the family, Cronenberg’s subversions are coming from a more distanced lens where we don’t know right away that this family and this small town are harbouring secrets. It’s unlike other potentially transgressive films about American life like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where he proposes through direct surrealism that something is amiss from the outset, and the bugs can be seen crawling inside the severed ear almost immediately. The story of the Stall family is a fabrication and it is understood through a learned place of movies and mythology, most particularly the Westerns of John Ford, with Tom Stall operating as a pseudo-Henry Fonda—a figurehead of a decent man and a protector of a community. The life that the people of Middlebrook are living is an expressionistic American yearning of a distant past. There have been updates to the town, but Cronenberg treats them with a sense of substitution, such as a mall standing in for a saloon. There’s a symmetry to the life they’ve built for themselves in Middlebrook with the primordial civilizations of the Old West. In the broader scope of Cronenberg’s films, he tends to reveal the primitive nature of human urges and behavior through the paradoxical lens of advancing technologies. Sometimes the way that these behaviors manifest change and die out (Shivers, Rabid), or grow with the intensity of a fetish around a human invention (Crash, Crimes of the Future). In A History of Violence, he uses the conflict of identity within Tom Stall, who may or may not have a history as a killer in a past life, to disrupt the sustainability of the roles that people ascribe to themselves in order to keep the micro-civilization of a family unit from falling apart.

Full essay over here

Before Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla II went into production, Toho decided that it would be the last Godzilla film of this cycle. They had ed the rights onto American company TriStar pictures with the caveat that they had final clearance on how Godzilla would appear in those movies. The first taste of the TriStar agreement came in a series of commercials for shoe company Nike featuring current NBA Superstar Charles Barkley squaring off against the creature in a metropolis setting with both of them towering like sky-scrapers. The commercials are a cute relic and debuted during the MTV Video Music Awards in 1992 (The notorious year when Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain supposedly got into a fight, Krist Novoselic accidentally conked himself in the head with his own bass, and Prince showed his ass during a performance of “Gett Off”). TriStar tried numerous times to get their Godzilla off the ground with directors like Alex Cox, Tim Burton and Jean de Bont all attached at one time, but nothing came for many years out of this initial agreement between Toho and TriStar, except that Charles Barkley commercial. It’s probably the best American Godzilla film ever made. During Tri-Star’s difficult, over-blown pre-production, where everything quickly got out of hand, due to an edict of no suit-mation, and a dependence on CGI in the wake of Jurassic Park’s enormous success, Toho made a couple more Godzilla pictures. His battle against MechaGodzilla was the first of the “last” Godzilla films from this era, and it plays like a Greatest Hits package.

Takao Okawara is back in the director’s chair for this one with Koichi Kawakita once again handling special effects direction. Kazuki Omori’s sprawling screenplay style of the previous films is replaced with a more direct offering from Wataru Mimura, which sought to give audiences everything they could ever want from a Godzilla picture. It’s startling, for example, to see Godzilla within the first ten minutes of the film, and having already engaged in multiple sequences of combat before reaching the end of the first half hour (against a returning Rodan and MechaGodzilla). That doesn’t mean that the human element was completely side-stepped in favor of monster fights. In fact, this is a film which introduces a baby Godzilla, evoking Minilla from Son of Godzilla, and the relationship that he has with his human caretaker, scientist Azusa (Ryoko Sano), gives the film a Spielberg-ian type of emotional exploitation that works a little better than it probably should. The conflict that arises from an offspring of Godzilla suddenly being a chess-piece in the ongoing war against The King of the Monsters is one of pacifism vs military strategy, and feminine responses vs masculine ones. In the early 1990s, women comprised a larger share of the audience who were going to the movies, and this is a film, which sought to speak to that audience through a maternal plotline between this baby Godzilla and Azusa, while also appealing to the macho regulars who were only here to see Godzilla and MechaGodzilla fight one another. The film was enormously successful, but creatively exhausted.

Full essay over here

You can always count on Bruno Mattei to make it feel like you are actually stranded in purgatory. This one isn't very good, but I enjoyed seeing White Emmanuelle summon a fusion of Annie Lennox and the Bananarama "Cruel Summer" music video by exacting their fashion and hairstyling, despite it being 1976.

Watched on Friday April 11, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

It’s more than a little strange that it’s such a beautiful day for much of the runtime of The Woman in the Yard. The rich, dappling cinematography of Pawel Pogorzelski (Hereditary and Midsommar) is closer to Days of Heaven, than it is the usual dingy Gothic cool of so many trauma-induced horror movies of this era, including some that he shot. We can see everything, and the sun throws lovely beams of warm light all over the Georgia homestead of Ramona’s (Danielle Deadwyler) family, but the first time we see her, she’s trying to block all of that light out. The loveliness of the weather is like salt in the wound for her disposition. She lays in bed for too long on most days, and on this particular morning, she has the blankets pulled over herself, draining her phone-battery while watching a single video of her recently deceased husband David (Russell Hornsby). He speaks about having a dream that their fixer-upper house was finally finished, and there were Irises (Ramona’s favorite) blooming everywhere in their garden. After uprooting from the city, Ramona and David were living beyond their means with their two children Taylor (Peyton Jackson), a teenage boy, and Annie (Estella Kahiha), who is five years old. There are indications that the house was far from being finished, such as visible cracks in the walls, and with David now gone, the full responsibility of the home, which was already a lot for this family, has swallowed Ramona entirely. She has no time to feed the dog, feed her kids, or paint, but she has plenty of time to luxuriate in an old past time of hers: thinking about suicide.

A horror movie shouldn’t have to pull a trick on the audience to be worth considering, and in this grief-stricken age of trauma-as-metaphor, it is refreshing to watch a film as deliberate as The Woman in the Yard. When the meaning is obvious, what is left is how it is about that subject, rather than why. Sam Stefanak’s script is on-the-nose, which probably explains its popularity with the Blacklist crowd, but director Jaume Collet-Serra imbues the story with extraordinary craft, and Deadwyler’s performance introduces complexity through fraying, transformative body language, and moments of deep, internalized conflict. Deadwyler’s commitment to the project stretched beyond her performance as Ramona. She also acts as executive producer, and literally brought herself to the role in the form of donating all of her own self-portraits, which she created using a multi-faceted, mixed-media technique to stand-in for Ramona’s art. Deadwyler’s paintings and Collet-Serra’s technique blend together in a beguiling way that deepens both. Collet-Serra builds a language of mirrors, both literal and figurative, and a strange subjectivity accumulates, rendering Ramona as an increasingly vaporous person, where our understanding of her becomes off-balance, because she doesn’t understand herself either. This allows for the central boogeyman of the picture—the woman in the yard—to become more than just a metaphor for Ramona’s pain.

This movie rules. Full essay over here

Watched on Thursday April 10, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 10, 2025.

• The Wizard of Oz
• Angst
• Lady and the Tramp
• School of Rock
• April Fool's Day
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
• His House
• The Conformist
• Black Sabbath

  The Drop of Water segment

• King Kong

...plus 62 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

in descending order from my most recent viewing to oldest. Consider this a fashionable top 100 of the moment.

1. The Shooting
2. The Shrouds
3. Loose Corner
4. The Night of the Walking Dead
5. Destiny's Son
6. Suzanne, Suzanne
7. Blood Tea and Red String
8. The Signalman
9. Totally F***ed Up
10. Holiday

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Rules
1. Film must be watched while undergoing post-surgical vaginal dilation treatments
2. Film must be purchased on VHS at a local thrift store
3. Film must be watched on VHS

• Some Like It Hot
• Mystic Pizza
• Charade
• To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar
• Moonstruck
• Heat
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• Ronin
• Sugar & Spice
• Full Metal Jacket

...plus 113 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Boat Leaving the Port
• The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship
• The Cuckoo Murder Case
• Finishing School
• Holiday
• They Drive by Night
• Arsenic and Old Lace
• A Matter of Life and Death
• The Man I Love
• The Bee-Deviled Bruin

...plus 65 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Over on bluesky I'm engaging in one of those "1 like = 1 fave " prompts, but I'm only posting 1 film a day so I don't clog up anyone's feed. It's fun for me. I'll chronicle what I include here. I'm not thinking about it too hard. These examples are just going to be whatever film comes to mind while I'm having my morning coffee. The hope is that I'll maybe reveal something about my taste by thinking about my favorites instinctively, rather than analytically pouring over lists for the exact right movie. Maybe someone will watch one of these and discover a new favorite. Who knows.

• The Red Shoes
• Breakaway
• Suspiria
• Klute
• Funeral Parade of Roses
• Soft Fiction
• Ritual in Transfigured Time
• Possession
• Don't Look Now
• Porky Pig's Feat

...plus 29 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

As many of you likely already know, I have a book coming out this July via Repeater books called "Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema". I co-wrote this book with Caden Mark Gardner, and it has been a process years in the making. It is a thorough critical and historical examination in the vein of Vito Russo's, "The Celluloid Closet" covering how transness has evolved alongside the depiction of trans people in motion pictures. We look at everything from silent film to the avant-garde, to old Hollywood and David Cronenberg. We re-examine dominant trans film images such as Buffalo Bill in "The Silence of the Lambs" and Dil in "The Crying Game". We, of course, discuss "The Matrix", and we illuminate the changing dynamics of a cinema authored by trans people in the 21st century.

Corpses, Fools and Monsters is now available for pre-order.

Penguin>

Bookshop>

The following list is merely a sample of films which are covered in our book, and not a full list of all titles included in our text.

• The Silence of the Lambs
• The Crying Game
• Dog Day Afternoon
• Women in Revolt
• Funeral Parade of Roses
• The Matrix
• By Hook or by Crook
• We're All Going to the World's Fair
• The Christine Jorgensen Story
• Crash

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My ongoing horror series. I write an essay on a horror film each week.

This will be available to all $1 patrons on my patreon

1. Long Weekend

   "While watching Colin Eggleston’s 1978 Australian horror film Long Weekend, which is about environmental revenge, I kept thinking about the Bushfire Season of 2019, and the horrifying images that came out of that event. In particular my mind came back to a snapshot of a kangaroo, who was caught in a barbed-wire fence, and because of this, was crucified in place, and became like a sculpture of ash. This is an image of pure terror; one that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since seeing it, and the clearest indication in my eyes that climate change is here. Older movies that are about the horrible way we treat the world we live in hit with a particular sort of hopeless, jagged frustration when you’ve grown up to inherit a world your parents and grandparents took for granted. While watching these movies it’s clear that they had the capacity to act, before things capsized, and they chose their own comfort. Long Weekend is one of these movies, and Australia has a pattern of telling horror stories of the smallness of humankind, when contending with the ambivalent destruction of our environment, as it snuffs out any semblance of normal we’ve built in the ashes of our bad mistakes.

   We try to live in the comfort we inherited, but history has a way of repeating itself and we have a history of not learning from history."

   www.patreon.com/posts/monster-of-week-50470113

2. The Fury

   "I’m a Brian De Palma skeptic. I’ve always felt like his proclivities of maximalist technique were over-compensating to hide his disinterest in the potential soulfulness and presence of his characters. There are exceptions of course like Sissy Spacek’s meek, wounded teenage girl in Carrie (1976) and Al Pacino’s doomed gangster in Carlito’s Way (1993), but usually my experiences with De Palma are left wanting for a co-existence of form amid human complications. When watching his movies lately I’m reminded of his appearance on the Dick Cavett show alongside a young Martin Scorsese, and the topic of discussion eventually lands at the feet of assessing the work of Alfred Hitchcock. De Palma states bluntly, as if his opinion could not be argued with, that The Birds (1963) would be a good movie if Tippi Hedren were removed from it entirely. He goes on to complain that she’s a horrible actress and she gets in the way of Hitchcock’s stunning technical achievements. People like to compare De Palma to Hitchcock, but the master of suspense loved his actors and brought with him an observance of utmost precision. Hitchcock famously compared actors to cattle, but the irony in the statement is that his pictures don’t lie and in something like Rear Window (1954), he posits through Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair bound photographer that looking through a window isn’t worth much if there isn’t a person behind it doing something. Brian De Palma can direct, but our philosophies of what cinema can be clash with one another, almost spectacularly so, and even with his movies that I find good, and I count The Fury among those, this problem of what to do with technique arises."

   www.patreon.com/posts/50871519

3. Organ

   "Kei Fujiwara got her start working in theatre guilds in Japan, and it is there where she met Shinya Tsukamoto and became his right hand for many years. If you’ve seen Tsukamoto’s classic film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988) much of its look and texture can be credited to the inventiveness of Fujiwara. When making Tetsuo she was in charge of deg props and much of what became the gore effects. Fujiwara crafted with an amateur sense of wonder around the possibilities of what someone could do with household products. The phallic drill was her creation, made out of little more than a motor, tape and spray paint, and throughout all of this she kept a focus on the physicality of her inventions as a means of being an extension of the body. She was a perfect fir for Tsukamoto, whose own thesis on the human body becoming obsolete in the technological and economic boom of Japan gave Fujiwara’s proclivities towards a sensual erotic melding of flesh and material a dominating thematic presence. In an interview with MUBI Notebook that I highly recommend reading Kei Fujiwara describes movie-making as “capturing a world within a crystal ball”. She goes on to state that the joy of creating a movie is in defining the of your own universe. Filmmaking is a collaborative artform, and she gives much credit to the small crew of a half dozen that helped make Organ (1996), but she is adamant in the belief that the onus is on the director to catch the thunder of meaning and present it with clarity.

   Fujiwara brings much of what she learned working with Tsukamoto to her debut feature film Organ (1996), which follows a black-market organ harvester for the yakuza, the police chasing them down and the family caught in the middle. Many of the most compelling images and sequences in Organ can be traced back to Fujiwara’s influence in the early Tsukamoto films. Her surreal masterpiece of a woman (Fujiwara herself) ripping herself out of a cocoon layer by layer bears a striking similarity to the look of her vampire character doing much the same in Tsukamoto’s early short film The Adventures of Denchu Kozu (1987). Fujiawara’s interests in body horror seem to revolve around feminine indicators like child birth and menstruation, and she gets full reign to endow her horror with a yonic sensibility of openness and fluids. It is easy to chalk Organ up to being just another hard-core Japanese exploitation flick, but there’s a difference in the way she perceives gore and violence compared to someone like Takashi Miike or her mentor Shinya Tsukamoto."

   www.patreon.com/posts/monster-of-week-51258911

4. Murders in the Rue Morgue

   "I’ve never been more disturbed watching a movie than during Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1972). Brakhage’s short film is comprised of actual autopsy footage and the director dissects, frame by frame, to dissolve the human spirit to a point of science. The images are mathematics, tools, and objects, and it’s difficult to watch, because of Brakhage’s objectivity and refusal to flinch. It is a movie that I almost regret watching, because it makes the viewer all too aware of their own mortality and fragility, but I do think it is important to stare death in the eye. To do so prepares us a little better for what will eventually come for us all. It’s the same reason why we as people gather above open caskets for closure. Without that ritual the severing becomes that much more difficult and it is something most of us have had to deal with in one way or another this year. Brakhage’s short film isn’t a horror movie, but it forces the viewer to deal with realizations that are, and horror movies have a long history of seeing doctors as little more than butchers. This is especially true in the first few decades of the genre in the 1900s.

   This inherent fear of the medical industry is obviously rooted in the image of death, but it finds its origin in religious anxiety of meddling in things meant only for God. The initial monsters of the horror genre were mad doctors who sought to bring back the dead and take life into their own hands like that of Mary Shelley’s The Modern Prometheus (Frankenstein) and the arrival of Robert Wiene’s horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). In Caligari a carnival sideshow offers something in the vein of Lazarus with the command of a risen corpse, who is then endowed with a hunger for women not too far removed from the vampires of Bram Stoker, or what we’d later call zombies. Additionally, we as people come from a long line of witch burning’s in the name of God that saw the destruction of women who were mid-wives and nurses of a sort. This is all rooted in the fear of the unknown, but it also emblematic of a brain-washed fear of hell that renders any scientific pursuit to be one of sinful preoccupation. In the early 1930s Universal studios and Warner Bros made bank off the re-telling of fears we thought long ed, but then again, flash forward nearly one hundred years and there is still a cult of questioning around things like vaccines. We haven’t changed all that much, and the earliest of these horror movies can help us to understand where we came from and why there’s such a fear of medical experimentation."

   www.patreon.com/posts/51416694

5. Alice, Sweet Alice

   "In Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), the Church is everywhere; in every frame; leering and looking on, like a surveillance state of the divine. It is a movie that is almost bleeding out religious imagery from its very pores, but here, crosses don’t save, they cut."

   www.patreon.com/posts/monster-of-week-51777836

6. Lake Mungo

   "I’m unsure if ghosts or spirits are real, but I do believe a place can become bad with context, memory and grief. What haunts us are the physical remnants of something that should be there, but isn’t any longer. It’s an entirely relatable feeling to experience something lingering in the strangeness of someone you always depended upon being ripped out of the world. Sometimes people never quite recover. Whenever we lose someone important it changes us, we adapt, but we’re never the same person we used to be. Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo (2008) is about this very thing, as he takes a look at the Palmer family, who are learning to live without sixteen year old Alice (Talia Zucker) in the wake of her drowning.

   Lake Mungo is a “documentary” that presents itself as fact and Anderson treats the grief of these characters with a sincerity that is never once undercut by his direction. Usually in these fakeout documentaries and found footage horror movies there’s a release of tension with an unconscious fourth wall-breaking mentality on the part of the filmmakers. The found footage genre, if treated with irony, falls apart like a house of cards. Lake Mungo is one of the best this subgenre has to offer, because Anderson believes in what his characters are feeling. He also has the intelligence to realize that all of this is more effective if he gestures to realism as often as possible. Lake Mungo was shot on various film stocks and modes of video and is all the better for it. Early on there’s a news report of divers looking for Alice at the bottom of the lake, unable to find her, that recalls the pre-HD era of television broadcasting with all its crackly grain and muffled audio. When Alice’s body is eventually recovered the camera is held back and Anderson refuses to linger on the corpse, because he knows that they couldn’t do it on television during that same time period. A little touch like that one goes a long way in bringing the audience into the lie so they can believe in what is being presented. Anderson’s choices in this regard are so understood that if one were to fall upon Lake Mungo on television with no context whatsoever of what it was, the viewer would potentially believe it all to be real, because Anderson treats it as such."

   www.patreon.com/posts/monster-of-week-52111189

7. The Witch Who Came from the Sea

   TW: Childhood abuse, Sexual Assault, Incest

   "Molly (Millie Perkins) likes to tell stories about her father to her nephews. He was a sailor and good at everything that came with it. She talks as if in a daze, hypnotized by the crashing tides of the sea, looking outward, estranged from reality, as if something out there were calling to her. She ends every story by printing the legend of the man who raised her by proclaiming that he’s lost out there in the Ocean trying to find his way home. Molly is lying to herself as a form of protection to create the man she wishes her father could have been, because the man he was made a habit of raping his daughters. That’s the story Molly won’t tell. She keeps that one to herself."

   Full essay:
   www.patreon.com/posts/monster-of-week-52388313 ($1 patrons)

8. Cronos

   "Guillermo Del Toro is a builder above all else. He is an obsessive of the finer details of his very own creations. It is sometimes easy for him to be awash in the mechanics of the tinkerer who has built a clock, or the dissector who must know the inner-workings of a beetle. He is ionate about the nooks and crannies of his dorkiest preoccupations, and it comes through in his work with earnest iration. From the beginning he has built a monument to everything that makes him tick as a creative force, which makes him an auteurist in the purest sense of the word, but with Del Toro he is so hyper-specific in his own interests that his films sometimes have the effect of a tunnel-vision for the real world. It’s difficult to consider the grander scope, because he is so invested in the fable of his own creation that he can sometimes become impenetrable, and cannot see the world around him. This occasionally results in some embarrassing tone-deaf moments like the alignment of the plight of the monster in The Shape of Water (2017) with that of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and Richard Jenkins’s gay neighbor, who is always there to lend a hand to the love-lorn mute played by Sally Hawkins. In the remnants of a past cinema it is possible to excavate meaning when there was none, but lifting a reading note for note into the present tense can become a precarious notion. Del Toro loves what he loves with such grandness and ferocity that it is sometimes an undoing factor in his own work, but it is also that very same trait that makes his films his. He has been this way since his first feature film Cronos (1993), which is a fairy tale that mixes elements of Frankenstein and Dracula into an exegesis of mortality, family and learning to love monsters."

   Full review here:
   www.patreon.com/posts/52660060 ($1 patrons)

9. Manhattan Baby

   "Watching the work of Lucio Fulci can feel a bit disorienting at times. Where some might see incompetence in plot or narrative common-sense I see a deliberate shedding of unnecessary parts for aleaner expression. In Manhattan Baby (1982), during a trip to Egypt, eight year-old Susie (Brigitta Boccoli) is given an ancient pendent by a spectre of doom and strange things begin to happen when she arrives home. The lights begin to flicker, people she knows disappear and in some cases those around her are dying in horrible ways. Fulci’s work in horror is characterized by a haziness that comes from the dream state and that period of sleep when you’re aware you’re dreaming, but cannot wake-up. In his best films this results in a feeling of genuine danger where the cutting from image to image can act in a violent manner, and propel the viewer to and from horrible scenarios with little to no care for the mental clarity of the audience. In that manner Fulci is one of the finest operators of montage in the horror genre, because he cuts out the bridge between rising action and climax for a purer sense of image and movement. In his weaker movies, and this is one of them, he can feel stilted and disinterested in the mechanics of foundation laying for later scares, but having said that, Fulci still comes out full-force in Manhattan Baby whenever he can get his hands dirty with the blood of his actors."

   Monster of the Week
   Full Essay here:
   www.patreon.com/posts/52928321 ($1 patrons)

10. Blind Beast

    "Blind Beast isn’t quite a horror film or an exclusively erotic one; resting somewhere in the middle of those two genres with an eagerness to dress itself in the fashion of either. In Blind Beast a blind sculptor named Michio (Eiji Funakoshi) is obsessed with transcending common associations with art and finding a new mode of expression through tactile sensation. Director Yasuzo Masamura was also looking to break down the notions of what art could be. After returning from a fellowship in Europe, Masamura stated that he wanted to “create an exaggerated depiction featuring only the ideas and ions of living human beings”, and that, “Japanese society, which is essentially regimented, freedom and the individual do not exist. The theme of Japanese film is the emotions of the Japanese people, who have no choice but to live according to the norms of that society . . . After experiencing Europe for two years, I wanted to portray the type of beautifully vital, strong people I came to know there." While in Europe Masamura became acquainted with Michelangelo Antonioni and sought to bring a similar type of cinematic revolution to Japan.

    As one of the guiding lights of the Japanese New Wave, the elder Masamura was an inspiration to Nagisa Oshima. Oshima believed that Masamura was one of the few directors in the 1950s, along with Shohei Imamura, who were doing something outside the realm of the traditional Japanese cinema that had been characterized with the likes of Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. Masamura’s cinema espouses an individuality and a philosophical, avant-garde provocation of eroticism and self-destruction that was not at all dissimilar from the radicals like Akio Jissoji at the Art Theater Guild. In the 1960s Japan’s film industry began to collapse with the advent of television and the studios responded with motion pictures that presented things you couldn’t show on television like nudity, violence and an overall pessimistic flavor of regionally specific film noir that was actively commenting upon those who slipped through the cracks after World War II. This is how some of the film studios survived in the 1970s with the likes Kinji Fukasaku and actress Meiko Kaji being genuine draws in an age when they were few and far between, but before a movie like Female Convict Scorpion (1972) could be made the barriers of what was expected of Japanese cinema first had to come tumbling down.

    Masamura’s Blind Beast (1969) acts as a mirror to the film climate in Japan around the time of its release, which is roughly two years before Masamura’s home production company Daiei would go bankrupt, which shortened his career. Blind Beast is confined to a single set, but one that is endowed with a philosophical and erotic depth that enriches the picture. Masamura’s ability to communicate as much as he needs to with the camera is somewhat hampered by this limitation of production, but the stilted-ness of the camera is over-powered by the sculptures hung upon the set. The artist Michio has created an abstract labyrinth of sculpted body parts that are folded into one another like a type of modernist collage. Among his creations are Legs jutting out of legs, noses upon the wall and irises that seem to be gazing directly at everything in the twisted dark of his creation. The effect is disorienting and when the model Aki (Mako Midori) finds herself captive to the blind sculptor’s newest project she loses her sense of self amid the disted body parts of her new world."

    Full Essay Here:
    www.patreon.com/posts/monster-of-week-53226367 ($1 patrons)

...plus 75 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Each month I give my readers a chance to vote on which films I cover over on my patreon. This month we're looking at films from 1999. All of these films turn 25 years old this year, which makes me feel like hopping into a grave! I write about the two films which receive the most votes. Enjoy!

These polls are always open to the public and are not behind a paywall. Poll here

Here are the films:

• Eyes Wide Shut
• The Straight Story
• Beau Travail
• Ley Lines
• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
• Julien Donkey-Boy
• Being John Malkovich
• The Mission
• The Blair Witch Project
• But I'm a Cheerleader

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Each month I run a poll over on my patreon and I let my patrons decide which films I cover. I write essays on the two films with the highest vote totals. This poll is always open to the public and never behind a paywall.

This month's slate of films:

Vote here

• Sexy Beast
• Night of the Comet
• The Night of the Iguana
• The Killers
• Frankenhooker
• Our Father, the Devil
• The Boys from Fengkuei
• Blonde Death
• Singapore Sling
• Southern Comfort

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

These were the best old films that I watched last year that I had never seen before. There are certain trends if you look closely--Hal Hartley being an obvious one, and I am completely smitten with his work in the 90s. I filled in a few gaps with Buster Keaton to close out his filmography. A couple of Elvis films. And two from Pee-Wee Herman. There are demons, one necrophiliac autopsy technician, and more than a few residents of Warhol's Factory. Lon Chaney Jr is here, as are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Queen Latifah makes an appearance. As does John Ford. Daffy Duck and Kenneth Anger and Doris Wishman stand alongside one another. Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Elizabeth Taylor's camp era. Most importantly Martin Scorsese's mother, as she makes a mark with her pot of pasta sauce.

This list is in chronological order.

The best film I watched last year was probably La Belle Noiseuse.

• Birth of the Pearl
• One Week
• Go West
• The Cameraman
• West of Zanzibar
• The Smiling Lieutenant
• Woman of Tokyo
• Mystery of the Wax Museum
• Swing Time
• It's Love I'm After

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Each month I run a poll and let my readers choose what I cover. These are the options this month.

This poll is always available to the general public. Vote if you want. There is no paywall on link.

Poll here

• Body Snatchers
• Psycho II
• Bride of Chucky
• Seed of Chucky
• Cat People
• Split
• The Tenant
• We're All Going to the World's Fair
• Cure
• I Walked with a Zombie

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Each month I let my reader's decide what I cover over on my patreon. These are the options for potential coverage this month. Vote if you'd like. These polls are always available to the general public and they are not behind a paywall.

Vote here

• Boyz n the Hood
• Poetic Justice
• Battle Royale
• Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
• The Book of Life
• Experiment Perilous
• Ghost World
• The Craft
• Donnie Darko
• Zardoz

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Each month I write two essays on my patreon for my readership and these are chosen through a poll. This post is always available to the general public and is not behind a paywall. Please vote if you'd like. This month we're doing a queer cinema edition for Pride month.

Poll available here.

• Querelle
• Mala Noche
• Fresh Kill
• A Taste of Honey
• Rachel, Rachel
• The Doom Generation
• Pete

  stand in for entire Masc series

• Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker
• Nightbreed
• Lianna

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

If you don't already know the drill:

Each month I let my reader's pick two films that I write long form essays about over on my site.

These are the options this month. This is always a public post with no paywall.Feel free to vote even if you're not subscribed.

Poll here

• Throw Down
• Infernal Affairs
• Demonlover
• Miami Blues
• Francisca
• Juice
• An Autumn's Tale
• Pursued
• The Funhouse
• Empire of the Sun

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

If you don't already know the drill:

Each month I let my reader's pick two films that I write long form essays about over on my site.

These are the options this month

Poll here (public post)

• ear for eye
• High Plains Drifter
• Play It as It Lays
• Chilly Scenes of Winter
• The Story of Adele H.
• Crimes of ion
• The Company of Wolves
• August in the Water
• Ritual
• Ordet

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Towards an understanding of cinema and myself at this given moment in time. As always, beholden to my own taste and limited to what I've seen.

400 Films

Chronological Order

• Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter
• The Pillar of Fire
• The Kingdom of the Fairies
• Fantasmagorie
• The Unchanging Sea
• Falling Leaves
• The Doll
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• One Week
• Nosferatu

...plus 390 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Another year...another six hundred or so movies watched. You’ll never feel more like you’re wasting your life than when you’re looking back on how many films you watched in any given year, but I don’t know what I would be doing if I were not watching movies and writing about them. It moves me and gives my life structure. I’m bewitched by all that cinema is capable of and the cool thing about the film arts is you’ll never really run out of things to watch, because with age, old movies become new again, and there are always new discoveries to be made.

I live for film and these pictures are the ones I’m most grateful for in 2022. If you look closely you’ll notice some patterns. I spent a lot of time in the silent era of Japanese cinema this year and found a lot to love in works from Ozu, Naruse and Mizoguchi. I bought a CRT TV with a built in VHS player for the downstairs bedroom and raided the thrift stores for Jean-Claude Van Damme tapes like Timecop (one word, believe in it), Maximum Risk and Sudden Death. Van Damme’s work has aged the best of his Dad Rock contemporaries of Action Cinema, because he was willing to be vulnerable, and the way he showed off his body wasn’t for himself like it was for Ahnuld, but for women and gay men. His best work, like Timecop (amazing title, say it three times), is centred around him rushing to save a woman he’s in love with, but before then he’s open about how much his character loves eating pussy, or something as equally righteous. He’s great and my habit of adoring certain actors like Van Damme made for a hunky year. You’ll also notice Andy Milligan’s name appear a few times. I would make no great claims to his mastery of form or directorial prowess, but the acidity of his early queer works is so robust and of the time. His work is incredibly valuable as a snapshot of queer life shortly before and shortly after Stonewall. There are also a few Big Time Canon classics listed here like Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and Bresson’s Pickpocket. These are movies I should have seen years ago, but I have made myself purposefully slow with what I have remaining of the canon, because I find my appreciation of these directors to be more significant when I have watched their less renowned films prior to the monuments of their greatness. And once again there is a strain of transness on this list in films like Dressed in Blue and The Death of Maria Malibran. Both these films should have been canonized many, many years ago, and it is my hope that myself, and other trans critics like Caden Mark Gardner, Sam Bodrojan, and Juan Barquin and Programmer’s like Elizabeth Purchell can spotlight the shortcomings of film history for trans subjects in some way and open up the image to a darkened corner usually left alone. I also watched a lot of martial arts film, because I like when people get kicked in the face. Equally as reliable were horror movies from the 70s—the true golden decade for the genre—and among them there was much nudity, blood and vampires. A holy trinity of the genre if there ever was one. In some ways I will always be a woman of simple tastes.

1. One Week
2. Our Hospitality
3. 3 Bad Men
4. I Was Born, But...
5. No Blood Relation
6. Dragnet Girl
7. Every-Night Dreams
8. Fury
9. Grand Illusion
10. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Full details here

This is a free/public post

• The Evil Dead
• Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
• The Vanishing
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Pulse
• Zombie Flesh Eaters
• Antichrist
• Don't Look Now
• Manhunter
• Cat People

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Full details here (public post)

1. The Thin Man
2. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
3. Blue Collar
4. Midnight Run
5. Arabesque
6. Sunflower
7. Year of the Dragon
8. M. Butterfly
9. China Doll
10. The Last Wave

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

each month I take a look at what's being featured on the Criterion Channel and I compile a list of potential films for coverage. Some of these I've seen before, and others are new to me.

I will write about the TWO films that receive the most votes on my patreon.

Full details here . There's never a paywall on these polls. Please consider subscribing if you'd like access.

• House of Bamboo
• The Champ
• Gentleman Jim
• Fat City
• a.k.a. Cassius Clay
• When We Were Kings
• No Regrets for Our Youth
• Victor/Victoria
• Desert Fury
• Secret Honor

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Each month I run a poll on my patreon and ask folks to vote for what they want me to cover this month. This is always a public post and not behind a paywall. This month we're doing a Pride themed poll.

If you'd like to vote you can do so here

The films in this list are the options in the poll.

• Je Tu Il Elle
• In a Year with 13 Moons
• Happy Together
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
• The Long Day Closes
• Madame X – An Absolute Ruler
• Hellraiser
• But I'm a Cheerleader
• Female Trouble
• The Curse of the Cat People

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Each month I run a poll of which movies I might cover. It's always a public post. Full details here

1. Supermarket Woman
2. They Drive by Night
3. Falling in Love
4. Violets are Blue
5. The Dead
6. SubUrbia
7. Grand Illusion
8. Terminal USA
9. Strawberry Fields
10. Last Night at the Alamo

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Full details over here

• Magnificent Obsession
• Odds Against Tomorrow
• Peppermint Soda
• Cane River
• ion Fish
• Big Fish & Begonia
• David and Lisa
• Seven Women, Seven Sins
• Truck Turner
• The Milky Way

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

More details here

• The Boys in the Band
• Theorem
• Bull Durham
• Just Don't Think I'll Scream
• Merrily We Go to Hell
• Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
• Wattstax
• Bright Future
• Crime Wave
• Dragonwyck

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

unranked

post with screencaps here
curtsiesandhandgrenades.com/index.php/2022/01/11/the-50-best-movies-i-watched-in-2021/

1. The Kingdom of the Fairies
2. It's the Cat's
3. The Crowd
4. The White Stadium
5. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas
6. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
7. Murders in the Rue Morgue
8. Mad Love
9. A Night at the Opera
10. My Man Godfrey

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• 3 from Hell
• Kill, Baby... Kill!
• The Little Foxes
• Girls Just Want to Have Fun
• The Lady from Shanghai
• Klute
• King Kong
• Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable
• Rear Window
• To Catch a Thief

...plus 125 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Towards an understanding of cinema and myself at this given moment in time. As always, beholden to my own taste and limited to what I've seen.

250

Chronological order

• Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter
• The Kingdom of the Fairies
• Fantasmagorie
• Falling Leaves
• The Doll
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• Strike
• A Page of Madness
• Faust
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

...plus 240 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Each week I'm going to review one film from this list until I've reviewed them all.

This will be available to all $1 patrons on my patreon
www.patreon.com/posts/50219001

• Toolbox Murders
• The Stone Tape
• Lake Mungo
• Identikit
• Red Spirit Lake
• A Dark Song
• Mermaid Legend
• The Woman in Black
• The Night of the Hunted
• The Sect

...plus 49 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Towards an understanding of cinema and myself at this given moment in time.

I may do this as a yearly exercise going forward.

250

Chronological order

• Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter
• Fantasmagorie
• Falling Leaves
• The Doll
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• Strike
• Faust
• Invitation to a Journey
• KoKo's Earth Control
• The ion of Joan of Arc

...plus 240 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Faust
• A Day in the Country
• The Scarlet Empress
• Only Angels Have Wings
• Stagecoach
• Cat People
• The Red Shoes
• Seven Samurai
• The Tarnished Angels
• Window Water Baby Moving

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

movies I watched in 2020 while stoned af

• Simon of the Desert
• Viy
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• Hungry Wives
• Horror Express
• The Big Lebowski
• Jason and the Argonauts
• WHAT DID JACK DO?
• The Giant Claw
• Basic Instinct

...plus 39 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Writing + Screencaps in link

curtsiesandhandgrenades.com/index.php/2021/01/05/the-50-best-movies-i-watched-in-2020/

1. Soft Fiction
2. The Conformist
3. The Tarnished Angels
4. High and Low
5. Belladonna of Sadness
6. Now, Voyager
7. The Naked Kiss
8. WMEN
9. Woman in the Dunes
10. Five Shaolin Masters

...plus 41 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas
• Some of My Best Friends Are...
• The Curse of the Cat People
• The Shop Around the Corner
• It's a Wonderful Life
• Little Women
• Carol
• The Snowman
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
• A Charlie Brown Christmas

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ongoing

1. The Tale of Zatoichi
2. Fight, Zatoichi, Fight
3. The Tale of Zatoichi Continues
4. Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold
5. New Tale of Zatoichi
6. Zatoichi the Outlaw
7. Zatoichi's Vengeance
8. Zatoichi's Pilgrimage
9. Zatoichi's Flashing Sword
10. Zatoichi's Revenge

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Tuesday, September 1st
Merrily We Go To Hell (1932) directed by Dorothy Arzner
Olivia (1951) directed by Jacqueline Audry
Sleepwalking Land (2007) directed by Teresa Prata
Seven Beauties (1975) directed by Lina Wertmüller
Je tu il elle (1974) directed by Chantal Akerman
Mädchen in Uniform (1931) directed by Leontine Sagan
La Ciénaga (2001) directed by Lucrecia Martel

Tuesday, September 8th
El Camino (1963) directed by Ann Mariscal
Lovely & Amazing (2001) directed by Nicole Holofcener
Wanda (1970) directed by Barbara Loden
The Watermelon Woman (1995) directed by Cheryl Dunye
In the Empty City/Hollow City (2004) directed by Maria João Gonga
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) directed by Lotte Reiniger
Entre Nous (1983) directed by Diane Kurys

Tuesday, September 15th
Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) directed by Barbara Kopple
The Virgin Suicides (1999) directed by Sofia Coppola
Loving Couples (1964) directed by Mai Zetterling
Zero Motivation (2014) directed by Talya Lavie
10 to 11 (2009) directed by Pelin Esmer
Losing Ground (1982) directed by Kathleen Collins
Strangers in Good Company (1990) directed by Cynthia Scott

Tuesday, September 22nd
The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005) directed by Byambasuren Davaa
Salaam Bombay! (1988) directed by Mira Nair
Daughters of the Dust (1991) directed by Julie Dash
Krane’s Confectionery (1951) directed by Astrid Henning-Jensen
Mikey and Nicky (1976) directed by Elaine May
The Juniper Tree (1990) directed by Nietzchka Keene
The Women Who Loved Cinema (1 & 2) (2002) directed by Marianne Khoury

Tuesday, September 29th
Middle of Nowhere (2012) directed by Ava DuVernay
Beau Travail (1999) directed by Claire Denis
Adoption (1975) directed by Márta Mészáros
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) directed by Lynne Ramsay Wasp (2003) directed by Andrea Arnold
XXY (2007) directed by Lucia Puenzo
My American Cousin (1985) directed by Sandy Wilson Antonia’s Line (1995) directed by Marleen Gorris

Tuesday, October 6th
The Ascent (1977) directed by Larisa Shepitko
Meek’s Cutoff (2010) directed by Kelly Reichardt
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) directed by Maya Deren
Angry Inuk (2016) directed by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril
Daisies (1966) directed by Věra Chytilová
Cameraperson (2016) directed by Kirsten Johnson
The Erl King (1931) directed by Marie-Louise Iribe

Tuesday, October 13th
Dogfight (1991) directed by Nancy Savoca
Rafiki (2018) directed by Wanuri Kahiu
The House is Black (1963) directed by Forugh Farrokhzad
First Love (1977) directed by Joan Darling
The Night Porter (1974) directed by Liliana Cavani
Le Bonheur (1965) directed by Agnes Varda
Danzón (1991) directed by Maria Novaro

Tuesday, October 20th
Tomka and His Friends (1977) directed by Xhanfise Keko
Stop-Loss (2008) directed by Kimberly Peirce
Madeinusa (2006) directed by Claudia Llosa
Corpo Celeste (2011) directed by Alice Rohrwacher
The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906) directed by Alice Guy-Blaché
Araya (1959) directed by Margot Benacerraf
Children of a Lesser God (1986) directed by Randa Haines

Tuesday, October 27th
Fools in the Mountains (1957) directed by Edith Carlmar Girlfriends (1978) directed by Claudia Weill
Party Girl (1995) directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer
The Connection (1961) directed by Shirley Clarke
Lost in Yonkers (1993) directed by Martha Coolidge
Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914) directed by Mabel Normand
Foreign Letters (2012) directed by Ela Thier

Tuesday, November 3rd
Outrage (1950) directed by Ida Lupino
Boat People (1982) directed by Ann Hui
Born in Flames (1983) directed by Lizzie Borden
Hannah Arendt (2012) directed by Margarethe von Trotta Shoes (1916) directed by Lois Weber
Stolen Life (2005) directed by Shaohong Lee
Rachida (2002) directed by Yamina Bachir-Chouikh
The Photograph (2007) directed by Nan Triveni Achnas

Tuesday, November 10th
Silent Waters (2003) directed by Sabiha Sumar
The Hurt Locker (2008) directed by Kathryn Bigelow
The Day I Will Never Forget (2002) directed by Kim Longinotto Gas Food Lodging (1991) directed by Allison Anders
Crime Thief (1969) directed by Nadine Trintignant
The Teckman Mystery (1954) directed by Wendy Toye
The Night of Truth (2004) directed by Fanta Régina Nacro

Tuesday, November 17th
Stories We Tell (2012) directed by Sarah Polley
Shag (1989) directed by Zelda Barron
The Day I Became a Woman (2000) directed by Marzieh Makhmalbaf
Lourdes (2009)directed by Jessica Hausner
Found Memories (2011) directed by Julia Murat
Orlando (1992) directed by Sally Potter
Yentl (1983) directed by Barbra Streisand

Tuesday, November 24th
An Angel at My Table (1990) directed by Jane Campion
Sweet Bean (2015) directed by Naomi Kawase
27 Missing Kisses (2000) directed by Nana Dzhordzhadze
The Kite (2003) directed by Randa Chahal Sabag
My Brilliant Career (1979) directed by Gillian Armstrong
This is the Sea (1997) directed by Mary McGuckian
Heart of a Dog (2015) directed by Laurie Anderson

Tuesday, December 1st
Crossing Delancey (1988) directed by Joan Micklin Silver Karnaval (1982) directed by Tatyana Lioznova
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) directed by Penelope Spheeris
Smithereens (1982) directed by Susan Seidelman
The Lure (2015) directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska
La Cigarette (1919) directed by Germaine Dulac
Very Annie Mary (2001) directed by Sara Sugarman

• Merrily We Go to Hell
• Olivia
• Sleepwalking Land
• Seven Beauties
• Je Tu Il Elle
• Mädchen in Uniform
• La Ciénaga
• El camino
• Lovely & Amazing
• Wanda

...plus 89 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Alphabetical order

• 88:88
• 13 Assassins
• Abuse of Weakness
• Ace Attorney
• Ad Astra
• Ash Is Purest White
• The Assassin
• Attenberg
• Bastards
• Beyond the Lights

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

post with screencaps here:

curtsiesandhandgrenades.com/index.php/2020/01/01/the-50-best-movies-i-watched-in-2019/?preview=true

1. Bad Timing
2. K-On! The Movie
3. School on Fire
4. Funeral Parade of Roses
5. A Canterbury Tale
6. A Day in the Country
7. Detour
8. Insignificance
9. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
10. Anne of the Indies

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I am watching the Godzilla movies. Here they are. Ranked as I go along.

1. Godzilla
2. Shin Godzilla
3. Mothra vs. Godzilla
4. Terror of Mechagodzilla
5. Godzilla vs. Mothra
6. Godzilla vs. Hedorah
7. Son of Godzilla
8. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster
9. Destroy All Monsters
10. Godzilla vs. Biollante

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Not on LB:
Nichijou

Some of these titles are stand-ins for television. Check notes

• Fantasmagorie
• Little Nemo
• The Sinking of the Lusitania
• The Clown's Pup
• The Adventures of Prince Achmed
• KoKo's Earth Control
• Swing You Sinners!
• Bimbo's Initiation
• A Hunting We Will Go
• Betty Boop, M.D.

...plus 78 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Around two years ago I made a list of my top 100 favourite films created through a random number generator from a selected list of favourites. This is the second year.

The first list can be found here
letterboxd.jeux1001.com/catelyn/list/top-100-randomized/

1. The Earrings of Madame de...
2. The Searchers
3. Marie Antoinette
4. Dance, Girl, Dance
5. May
6. Blue
7. Tokyo Chorus
8. Roman Holiday
9. PTU
10. A Real Young Girl

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Red Shoes
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
• Suspiria
• Window Water Baby Moving
• Breakaway
• At Land
• Only Angels Have Wings
• The Meetings of Anna
• Angel's Egg
• Paris Is Burning

A list of films I've seen from Takashi Miike in order of preference.

1. Dead or Alive 2: Birds
2. Audition
3. Ley Lines
4. The Happiness of the Katakuris
5. Deadly Outlaw: Rekka
6. Ace Attorney
7. Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City
8. Fudoh: The New Generation
9. Rainy Dog
10. Ichi the Killer

...plus 31 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

ongoing

1. Cat People
2. I Walked with a Zombie
3. Stars in My Crown
4. Canyon age
5. Anne of the Indies
6. Out of the Past
7. The Flame and the Arrow
8. Way of a Gaucho
9. The Leopard Man
10. Wichita

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

ongoing

• School on Fire
• City on Fire
• Prison on Fire
• Burning Paradise
• Twin Dragons
• Prison on Fire II

100 best films since we stopped partying like it was 1999.

List is organized in alphabet street

(as always I need to see more movies)

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
2. 35 Shots of Rum
3. 88:88
4. Before Sunset
5. Blackhat
6. Birth
7. By the Sea
8. Bright Star
9. The Captive
10. Cameraperson

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

*notes
*Jojo's Bizarre Adventure 1993 OVA is standing in for the David Production version, which is not on Letterboxd
*The Trilogy of Terror entry is only for "Amelia"
*The Watcher at #47 is standing in for "The Watcher". A short film from the television series "Thriller"

Full list with screencaps and words here:
curtsiesandhandgrenades.blogspot.com/2018/12/top-50-of-2018.html

1. Klute
2. Breakaway
3. Little Women
4. Gunbuster
5. Taipei Story
6. Two for the Road
7. They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
8. Porky Pig's Feat
9. Fantasmagorie
10. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

...plus 39 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

If it ain't here I haven't seen it.

The top 6 are undeniable in my eyes

• The Bridges of Madison County
• Letters from Iwo Jima
• A Perfect World
• The Outlaw Josey Wales
• Million Dollar Baby
• Unforgiven
• The Mule
• Sully
• High Plains Drifter
• Changeling

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I probably won't watch all of these

THRILLER (TV SHOW): Not on LB but watching it

The Rob Zombie's are rewatches

• House of 1000 Corpses
• The Devil's Rejects
• Halloween
• Halloween II
• The Lords of Salem
• 31
• Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters
• The Witch Who Came from the Sea
• Who Can Kill a Child?
• Angst

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Am I ripping off Neil? A bit, BUT I'm also basically just moving this list over here. Movies are alright

twitter.com/willow_catelyn/status/970007911094132737

• Twin Peaks: The Return
• Cameraperson
• No Home Movie
• The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
• Under the Skin
• s Ha
• Margaret
• Meek's Cutoff
• Halloween II
• Sparrow

...plus 100 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

First incarnation of the studio only

1. Cash on Demand
2. The Curse of Frankenstein
3. Quatermass and the Pit
4. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
5. The Brides of Dracula
6. The Devil Rides Out
7. Nightmare
8. Dracula
9. Twins of Evil
10. The Hound of the Baskervilles

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.