Some might see the three star rating sitting atop this review and think, “Oh, I guess he didn’t like it that much.” But I want to be clear, I have a lot of admiration for this film. The scares are effective, Parker Finn is a good director, and this film’s success is good for the industry. When a movie like Smile tops the box office in multiple weeks, that opens the door for more original projects from new voices. All that being said, I can’t help but feel Smile isn’t living up to its full potential.

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Werewolf by Night represents several firsts. It’s Marvel’s first “Special Presentation,” the title they’re giving one-off Disney+ content. The Guardians of the Galaxy are also hopping into this new format, they’ve got their Holiday Special coming out this December. As an aside, I wonder if anyone watched those Groot short films they put out this summer? It’s also Michael Giacchino’s first special, as he works his way through every possible format until he gets his first feature film. Before this, Giacchino made a short film called Monster Challenge in 2018 and also directed an episode of Star Trek: Short Treks, the short-form anthology show that definitely would have been called “webisodes” if it came out 10 years earlier. We’re living in a brave new world.

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On February 14th, 2003 (Valentine’s Day) I saw the immortal classic “Daredevil” starring Ben Affleck on the big screen. I had a good time–only to discover years later that the film was bad–but it was in the film’s closing minutes that I felt my Spidey-sense (or whatever Daredevil has) tingling. My bladder was going to explode! Finally, as the film faded to black and the credits started to roll, I was free! I hightailed it to the bathroom never to look back. This was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

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As we’ve sped up the normalization of releasing new movies on streaming due to these rough few years for the movie business, it has caused me to ask when a streaming release does a disservice to a movie and when it actually benefits it. Obviously, there were a couple of movies released this summer that would’ve been considerably more enjoyable to watch in a theater, but at the same time, it is hard to deny that streaming can make a weirder, less commercial film easier to discover than it otherwise would’ve been. I would say that The House falls into the latter category, since I have a hard time seeing this movie becoming the kind of sleeper hit that another stop-motion film, Marcel The Shell with Shoes On, became earlier this year. Yet on Netflix, it’s a curiosity waiting there for anyone looking for something a bit off-kilter, though it’s hard to say if you could depend on The Algorithm to actually send you its way. Continue reading →

I don’t know if it’s the case for everyone, but for me, it was easy to go into Barbarian cynical. Thanks to the success of A24 and Jordan Peele, it kinda looked like a movie that was just copying the modern formula for success: get a comedy guy to write and direct a low-budget horror movie set in one location where the real villain is contemporary social issues. In fact, star Georgina Campbell went as far as to say Jordan Peele was “part of the essence of the movie.” But then I saw it and realized words like “formulaic” and “derivative” don’t really apply to Barbarian and so what if it’s trendy? It’s part of a good trend! All that really means is that it was perhaps slightly more likely to be successful. I see this as an absolute win.

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