"Hokum" isn't Hokum

Adam Scott has a face built for mild inconvenience. In Parks and Recreation, it was the mild inconvenience of municipal bureaucracy. In Severance, it was the mild inconvenience of corporate dystopia. In "Hokum," it is the mild inconvenience of an ancient, festering Irish curse that wants to unspool his sanity like a cheap ball of yarn. Damian McCarthy, the maestro of subterranean claustrophobia who previously gave us Caveat and Oddity, takes Scott’s trademark tightly wound normalcy and tosses it headfirst into the muddy, blood-stained bogs of a fiercely unforgiving folk horror. The result... a gloriously nasty piece of cinematic cruelty that will make you want to scrub your skin with steel wool.

Read more »

"Project Hail Mary" is a Positive sign of The Times

Space is traditionally cinema’s favorite haunted house—a cold, infinitely expanding vacuum where humanity goes to learn exactly how small and doomed it is. But Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s "Project Hail Mary" takes one look at that terrifying abyss and decides it's actually the perfect setting for a buddy road trip, or rather, a buddy space trip. It's a wildly optimistic, deeply joyful film that suggests the universe may not just be a void waiting to swallow us, but a massive, wondrous laboratory waiting to be understood—preferably with a good friend in the passenger seat.

Read more »

"Mortal Kombat 2" is a RIOT

If you buy a ticket to "Mortal Kombat 2" and then bash the life out of it for lacking emotional depth, you need your cinematic license revoked. What exactly were you hoping to find? A subtle exploration of grief? Anyone marching into Simon McQuoid’s hyper-violent sequel armed with a notepad to grade its narrative gravitas has completely lost the plot. This film doesn't hide from what it is; it practically screams it while tearing out a jugular. It is a loud, wildly cheesy, outlandish, and unapologetically gory ode to a franchise built on digitized decapitations, and its greatest strength is that it never once takes itself seriously.

Read more »

"Wasteman" & The British Talent Rising Through The Ranks

When the heavy iron doors of a modern correctional facility slam shut, they do more than cage the physical body; they systematically strip away the romantic illusions we harbor about justice, leaving behind a cold, feral ecosystem governed solely by survival. Cal McMau’s "Wasteman" resides entirely in this oxygen-deprived space. This is not the Hollywood fantasy of redemption behind bars, where noble men carve chess pieces and stare longingly out of barred windows. Instead, McMau has crafted a harrowing, claustrophobic nightmare that forces us to reckon with the tragic, inescapable cycle of incarceration, and the film examines how the very architecture of the system takes human potential and violently grinds it into dust.

Read more »

"Throw Momma From The Train" & My Love For Danny DeVito

To truly appreciate the beautiful, unhinged mind of Danny DeVito, you have to look at the genesis of his madness. Long before he was crawling naked out of leather couches or offering eggs in trying times as Frank Reynolds on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia—a role that feels like the glorious zenith of his comedic ethos—DeVito was already cultivating his signature brand of cinematic depravity behind the camera. As a massive fan who has consumed practically every frame of film he’s ever touched, I look at his 1987 directorial debut, "Throw Momma from the Train," as the Rosetta Stone for his uniquely dark and outrageous soul. It’s thrilling, it’s nasty, and it proves that DeVito has always been a master of finding absolute hilarity in the grotesque and the desperate.

Read more »

Ian McKellen Shines in "The Christophers"

There is a particular kind of tragedy in outliving your own relevance, but there is a fierce, almost terrifying beauty in refusing to go quietly. Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, "The Christophers," takes this existential reckoning and distills it into a blackly comedic, breathtakingly intimate chamber piece. It's a film that operates on the simmering frequency of a psychological thriller, but instead of cracking safes, the characters are cracking open each other's souls. It's a heist where the vault is a man's ego, and the prize... his legacy.

Read more »

"Lee Cronin's The Mummy" Will Turn You Vegan

How much raw, flayed anatomy must a person witness before they swear off the local Kebaby for good? It's a dietary conundrum I found myself pondering during the visceral climax of "Lee Cronin’s The Mummy." This is a film so enthusiastically dedicated to the tearing of scabby ass skin that I suspect it could transform the most iron-stomached, post-pub doner kebab aficionado into a militant vegan before the credits roll.

Read more »

"Faces of Death" is a Violent Meta Remake

To touch the rotting, infamous corpse of 1978’s "Faces of Death" is a cinematic gamble that could easily have devolved into a hollow cash grab. The original was a crude exploitation curio, a pseudo-documentary trading entirely on the morbid curiosity of the VHS era.But in the hands of director Daniel Goldhaber, this reimagining is resurrected not as a simple remake, but as a fiercely intelligent, meta-textual body horror that holds a cracked, blood-spattered mirror up to our modern digital decay.Pushing the boundaries of the modern genre, Goldhaber doesn't just recreate the gore of the past; he weaponizes it, crafting a dark, twisted, and profoundly unsettling exploration of a society drowning in its own voyeurism.

Read more »

"The Drama" is a Comically Violent Assassination of Character

If your fiancée confessed, over a nice bottle of Malbec, that she once spent a humid teenage summer mapping out the most efficient way to murder her entire class, would you appreciate the radical honesty, or would you start wondering why your wedding registry includes a set of professional-grade steak knives? It's the kind of question that Kristoffer Borgli doesn’t just pose; he staples it to your forehead and asks you to look in the mirror.

Read more »

"Islands" in The Stream

The scorching sun in this film is not a source of warmth; it's a searchlight, an interrogator that refuses to let the characters hide behind the shadows of their own intentions. We find ourselves on a volcanic outcrop in the Atlantic, watching a forlorn Brit named Tom, whose turned his life into a series of repetitive, mechanical gestures he now struggles to escape. He's a mediocre tennis coach with the enthusiasm of a scottsman with no whiskey at a resort that feels like a halfway house for those on a downward trajectory toward breakpoint—a man who facilitates the leisure of others while his own spirit seems to have undergone a slow, salt-water erosion. But when a complicated British couple enters his orbit, the film doesn't just begin a plot; it begins a dissection of the terrifying, jagged autonomy that we all carry like a concealed weapon.

Read more »