Pedestrian TV movie about a haunting, notable primarily for Elisabeth Moss as a moody teen coping poorly with her mother's death, smoking cigarettes and hanging out in graveyards with the cool-but-sensitive boy next door. (Austin O'Brien has some serious James from Twin Peaks energy, right down to the motorcycle and the well-coiffed block of wood blankness.)

This was Michael Slovis' first credit as director but he's worked primarily as a cinematographer before and since (I recognize his credit from Breaking…

Long-time readers know I'm an advocate for anvil-dropping Subtext Is For Cowards genre allegories and this is absolutely that. Moss gets to Act and Emote a whole bunch, which is neat even if I'm really cynical about how much this textbook psychopath film is faking its empathy re: abuse and gaslighting. There are multiple sympathetic allusions to gothic "madwoman in the attic" conventions but also some lazy gendered violence tropes, and the film completely throws away the ever-tightening paranoia for…

Mostly well made, sometimes incredibly so, but personally, I’d probably have been happier with something a little more stereotypically Blumhouse, and a little less stereotypically A24.

I have a fondness (weakness?) for both ghost stories and sociopolitical parable, but this is more like fractured folklore. Ideas veering off at acute angles from the same starting vertex, like two scissor blades which never open wide enough to cut cleanly (or to leave anything but shallow twinned puncture marks). Peele’s irable horror-buff…

An attempt to build a comedy of remarriage in an era where casual sex is the assumed default. Other than the longer-than-average takes that give the actors breathing room, and a bunch of comparatively frank sexuality, Sleeping with Other People is just another over-lit rom-com featuring tiresomely quirky people in an alternate universe New York.

As I mentioned in my Ghostbusters review, I’m staggeringly ill-informed when it comes to both comedy and television. I have never seen Jason Sudeikis in…

The spine of First Class is clearly from what would have been X-Men Origins: Magneto, tracing the post-war path by which Erik Lehnsherr, Nazi hunter, becomes Magneto, mutant supremacist. After the disastrous 2009 Wolverine spin-off, the studio wisely decided to the dark emotional journey of a lone wolf antihero by grafting on a large, youthful, and talented ensemble cast. When combined with the strategic infusion of blatant fan service for the core comics fans, First Class becomes a beautiful…