Time To Get Obsessed With Michael Johnston

I thought I might spend 2026 feeling more in line with my fellow critics on the horror movies than I did in 2025 -- when I wasn't jiving with movies lik Weapons and Good Boy that my peers were loving -- but my reaction to Obsession, writer-director Curry Barker's extremely well recieved new horror flick out in theaters now, has me second-guessing that instinct. Ciuz I didn't like it! Okay that's a bit harsh -- there are things I do like about it and I do mention them in my review which just dropped over at Pajiba, read it. But generally I think it's not nearly as daring as it believes itself to be -- although one thing I didn't mention there that I will mention here is that the film's leading man is played by that handsome fellow seen above; his name is Michael Johnston and I guess he was on the Teen Wolf series? 

I thought we'd run out of hot guys from that show by now who would force me to once again point out I never watched that show, but here we are. Anyway Johnston is good as the lead and he is very cute and, most importantly, he is also apparently openly gay! We love that for him! And for us! And our imaginations later. (He shows off his bum in the movie and it's one helluva bum y'all.) Anyway I bring up this fact not (just) so I could talk about his bum, but because the fact that casting a gay dude in this role is itself an extra-textual point in the movie's plus column. The movie is working very hard to obliterate the sad boy mindsets of incel straight dudes, and casting a gay guy to play that part is finely subversive stuff. I still think the movie doesn't really succeed with what it's trying to do for reasons I explain in the above-linked review, but it's got stuff going for it! My thoughts are really more mid than they are hateful. And hey that's something. Also something -- Google is telling me Mr. Johnston is partnered with a filmmaker named Anthony Sellitti who you can see below and umm... my goodness.

Hokum Sweet Hokum

I hope some of you went to see Damian McCarthy's new horror movie Hokum over the weekend! Starring Adam Scott as a writer who finds himself trapped inside a haunted hotel -- yes yes The Shining, The Shining, although honestly it made me think of Ti West's The Innkeepers more -- it's the third movie from the Caveat and Oddity director, and his best, says me in my review of the movie right here. Which is saying something because I loved the hell out of Oddity. McCarthy has cemented his place in the "director you should be very excited about" category now anyway -- we'll await every fresh announcement from him with bated breath. Oh and not to brag (that's a lie, I am one thousand percent bragging) but I managed to score one of the limited run of Hokum dolls that Neon dropped last week -- I've got a new cherished nerd collectible y'all!

They had TWENTY of these Hokum dolls on sale on Neon's webstore this morning AND I GOT THE LAST ONEEEEEEEE

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) May 1, 2026 at 11:11 AM

Taron Egerton Sling Time

Has Taron captured your attention? Good, that was my intention. Because I have a review for you to read! Click on over to Pajiba and you can read my thoughts on Apex, the Aussie wilderness thriller that stars Charlize Theron and Taron that just landed on Netflix today. It's good! I liked it! (Also Taron is naked in it! Even better!)

I Want My Mummy!

It's totally inexplicable how much not a Mummy movie this Mummy movie is. Lee Cronin's The Mummy (and I do think that's the official title in full, which... well that probably would've been a better choice had you been sure you'd made a great Mummy movie first, Mr. Cronin) is in fact, besides a couple of scenes set in Egypt and a sarcophogus, an Evil Dead movie. It's basically a remake of Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise (his last directorial effort) in fact, when it comes down to it. It's Evil Dead Rise with a bunch of CG sand flying around over everything every so often -- basically when Cronin remembers this is supposed to be a Mummy movie he makes some sand show up. Otherwise this is about a family who gets possessed one by one by a blasphemous demon, making little kids do the darndest things (or dare I even day, the damndest thing, gasp!), while ancient indecipherable artifacts get translated via obselete technology, and everything's extremely gross and obscene. 

The last bit is the best bit -- it's what I liked about Evil Dead Rise, too. Cronin is definitely not afraid to be extremely gross and extremely obscene. But as with EDR (which brought the Deadites to the city only to then keep them entirely contained to one building for the entire run-time, making it feel like a retread of everything we'd seen before in the franchise) the plot and the characterizations in this movie make so little sense from scene to scene; it's really just "gross and obscene" strung together by the thinnest of (admittedly sticky) threads. I didn't really hate my time watching this movie, but it's in no way "good" nor should anyone be applauded for how lazy it all is. Cronin made a terrific Irish Folk Horror movie in 2019 with The Hole in the Ground, but he's just been coasting on puke and pus and kids saying fuck ever since. Bad Mummy!

The Real Snuff

For some reason when my cousin and I were scouring the horror aisle at the video-store in my teen years we never bothered to rent the original Faces of Death -- probably because it clearly didn't have any sexy naked people, which is why we kept watching the same Slashers over and over again after all. But I was legitimately afraid of its VHS box too, and even though I now know it was all a bunch of hooey, that legacy of the forbidden remains attached to its title. And director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei (of the fantastic Cam) have done a solid job embracing and expanding that with their... it's not a remake. Reboot, I suppose. Set in a world like ours where the Faces of Death video haunted a generation, Faces of Death (2026 Edition) introduces a serial killer (Stranger Things' Dacre Montgomery) who's viciously reenacting the original's seedy tableaus to gain viral social-media fame. And it's up to a content moderator named Margot (Barbie Ferreira) to track him down and press permanant pause on his reign of cyber-terror! 

Anyway the very real gig where a person watches "content" all day long to flag the worst offenders has been sitting around for several years now outright begging for this treatment -- this movie would make a perfect double-feature with Prano Bailey-Bond's killer 2021 film Censor, which did the 1980s "Video Nasties" version of the same thing (and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the original Faces of Death got name-checked in that). And the team of Goldhaber & Mazzei do make some murderous magic of it, tapping into the very real social-media sickness that's saturated our culture, anesthetizing us to real horror. The film's at its best when its staring into the dead eyes of the normies who don't give a shit about violence for whatever reason, be they benefitting from its monetization or simply part of the parade of empathy husks now found on every corner. 

The actual stuff with Montgomery though, who goes way over the top, is a little less successful -- okay we get it Dacre, you watched Manhunter, you watched Dahmer; maybe dial it down a notch or two. This movie has stellar vibes that all his shrieking keeps swallowing up. As for Ferreira she makes for a likeable presence that we're rooting for. Even if the movie vacillates wildly between her character having superpowered MacGyver-like skills when it needs her to (the way she manages to break out of the killer's cage after being there for all of five seconds while the people who've been locked up for weeks look on -- if I'd been one of them I would've told her to fuck right off) while then having her acting dumb as a box of rocks when the movie needs that. In that same vein this whole new Faces of Death endeavor is both sloppier than necessary while also being smarter than it had any right for. You should be pleasantly surprised, even if your groans sometimes get the better of you. (Although a few points knocked off for Yet Another Dead Gay in a year of too many of those. I would just prefer not, y'all.)

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Synonyms (2019)

Yoav: I moved to France to flee Israel. Flee a state that is nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, sordid, fetid, crude, abominable, odious, lamentable, repugnant,
detestable, mean-spirited, mean-hearted... 

Emile: No country is all that at once.

Today is the 51st birthday of the rightfully outraged Israeli ex-pat filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who's weaponized his filmmaking to dissect the horrors of his homeland making one furious masterpiece after another. This includes the brilliant film above as well as 2014's The Kindergarten Teacher, 2021's Ahed's Knee, and the just-recently-released here in the U.S. film Yes. And speaking of Yes I am rather furious at myself for not reviewing that movie because I found it a total stunner, so let's throw down some words about it since the ocassion's presented itself. (I already shared the trailer right here.)

Yes tells the story of Y (Ariel Bronz) and his wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor) as they party the pain away in Tel Aviv, turning their radios up so they can drown out the sounds of the bombs dropping onto Gaza. He's a musician, she's a dance-instructor, and the two of them routinely hand off their baby son (pointedly named Noah) so they can humiliate themselves every night for the grotesque powers-that-be in order to sustain a living. Lapid gives the Israeli elite the full Beckmann & Dix treament, rendering them hideous to the point where they're literally bending over and waving their assholes in our face. It ain't sublte, nor should it be. 

Since the pair are gorgeous and entertaining and simply good at what they do (i.e. debasing themselves with extreme vigor) Y & Yasmin move pretty easily up the social ladder, until Y finds himself charged with writing a new national anthem for Israel in the wake of the October 7th attacks. For there he's shot through the cannon of a dark night of the soul as he tries to come to terms with his role as propogandist for genocide, but Lapid spares no one his visciousness; everyone is to blame for keeping the broken system afloat. Yes is brutal, brilliant, a ballistic missle shot straight at our insidious self-preservation in the face of so much unspeakable. Its farce is tragedy, all too familiar. All the punchlines are a horror; our laughter curdled, indistinguishable from screams. How au current, if you will. 

To Have and To Hold

I kind of can't believe how quickly this three-day-weekend I just had flew by -- I did have my cousin in town so that ate up my Saturday but otherwise I got very little accomplished and now I'm sitting here at my desk in a slumped-over daze wondering how, how, HOWWWW it is Monday. Anyway as threatened on Thursday my review of the dark romance The Drama did indeed drop over the weekend, so I am now updating you with a link! You can read my -- spoilery as hell -- review right here. I suppose it was a smart move by A24 to make out like this movie has a "twist" that could be "spoiled" but it's something that happens in the movie's first third and everything thereafter is fallout, so I considered it not only impossible but dumb as hell to try to write about the movie without spoiling what it's about since what's the fucking point of writing about it if I'm going to be coy? I don't see a point. I'm not here to coddle people, I'm here to talk about the fucking movie. And no I don't know why I am suddenly writing all of this in such an aggressive tone, good grief -- like I said I'm not entirely awake or entirely happy with being back at my desk already, so excuse my sudden onset of inflamed irritability. I suppose you add on that the movie really didn't work for me and whammo, short fuse. 

Super Mario Galaxy Movie in 200 Words or Less

My boyfriend and I have a running joke about how lesbian sex in the movies has long been reduced to two women holding their palms out flat toward the other's, hovering but not quite touching, which is to say that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie hinges on incestual lesbian sex saving the universe. So that's something! Indeed that's the best thing I can say about this clashing cacophony of noise which has me pitying all the poor parents out there -- get ready to paint eyes onto your eyelids so the kids don't catch onto your snooze, Moms and Pops. The movie does unlock its honest end-game though, in that it really made me want to dig out my dusty Wii to play Super Mario Galaxy again -- this is nothing but an assemblage of dopamine signifiers for Mario-heads, lapsed or still running, with nary a thought thunk outside that sphere. There is a scene where I really thought the movie might reenact Raiders' infamous opening of the ark scene, just with Bones Ghosts melting Princess Peach's face off, but that sadly didn't come to pass -- like everything here, opportunities super smashed. 

Make Jake The Groom!

All due apologies to the main cast of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!, meaning Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale mainly, but I was always going to begin this post with a picture of Jake -- no matter how small his role in the movie might be (and it's honeslty a little bit bigger than I assumed it would be) (that's what he said) it's always him. And thankfully a couple of extra shots from that new photoshoot I shared yesterday appeared this afternoon so no need for redundancy. Anyway! Exclamation point! The time has come, now that The Bride! is in theaters, for me to review The Bride! -- funny how that works. Click on over to Pajiba to read my thoughts on the movie, which is... 

... a lotta movie. I'm gonna make you click to find out if I liked it or not. But in related news the movie is already available to pre-order on physical media -- no release date set yet but buy the limited 4K steelbook here, or just the regular ol' blu-ray right here. That said you should probably watch the movie first, given how all over the map reactions have been. Also of note, physically-media speaking -- Waxwork Records is putting out a vinyl of the film's soundtrack which delightfully includes a few songs sung by Mr. Jake Gyllenhaal himself! That's out in May supposedly, you can pre-order it here. What a good sister Maggie is, giving her brother a lil' singing and dancing spotlight to savor. The boy loves a spotlight.

Behold Takashi Miike's Dead Body

I've long been lamenting the fact that Japanese director Takashi Miike's unyielding output is so overwhelming that it's futile business, keeping up here in the West where only one out of like every ten of his movies makes their way over. He's got 124 credits on his resume since 1991, which works out to be about three and a half projects (be they movies or T.V. or short films) every single year. He's like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, only alive. Also as as aside I also find it exciting that his next two projects are a Japanese version of the Bad Lietenant movies starring the gorgeous Shun Oguri...

... which is already in the can, and then, filming right now apparently, is a new horror movie starring Charli XCX! That's absolutely wild. But also that's not why we're here -- we're here because in a weird coincidence I ended up watching two Takashi Miike movies this past weekend without meaning to, and I wanted to direct you to one of them. The first one many of you have probably already seen before -- that was 2003's J-horror classic One Missed Call, which I watched because our pal Stacie Ponder of Final Girl fame had just talked it on the podcast The Evolution of Horror. That movie needs no talking up from me; it's a well-known blast. The second movie, though, that one I'd pre-ordered a blu-ray of ages ago and randomly pulled off my pile of movies to watch yesterday morning without even realizing it was a Miike movie until the end credits. 

That movie was 2014's Over Your Dead Body, which just got a gorgeous release from the fine folks at 88 Films (although it's a Region B disc so only consider buying it if you've got a region-free blu-ray player;  I can't speak to the quality of the U.S. blu-ray but that exists as well). Amazingly though I had never heard of this film when it came out, nor in the decade since then, and I'm genuinely bummed about that because I would've been singing its praises all these many years. It immediately became a top-tier Miike fave. Twisty and intelligent and sticky and meta as hell, it reminded me of everything from Kwaidan to Wes Craven's New Nightmare to Synecdoche New York and Drive My Car -- I thought it was a total stunner. 

The film tells the tale of a theatrical company practicing their upcoming stage version of Yotsuya Kaidan, aka the most famous and influential Japanese ghost story of them all. A good majority of the film takes place inside the warehouse-like theater, with the actors on the stage often mingling with the behind-the-scenes technicians -- the film keeps switching between us watching the play being performed and their performances being filmed like a movie, so the audience disappears -- Miike keeps blurring slash erasing the lines between what's real and what's fake in gorgeously disorienting ways. (In that way it reminded me of the purposeful artifice of his wackadoo gay western Sukiyaki Western Django from 2007, which always felt more like a spin on Querelle than it did the Django in its title). 

Anyway all of that's before you even get into the ways the actors' lives are intertwining with the story they're telling. If you're unaware Yotsuya Kaidan tells the story of a married samurai who wants to ditch his wife for a richer younger girl, and he gets some diabolical assitance in so doing thanks to his prospective in-laws, who're only too happy to poison the old wife so they can have a samurai for a son-in-law. Well as the actors are reenacting this story on the stage the leading man, who's partnered with his leading lady in real life, starts having an affair with his wife's stand-in. And let's just say the stand-in makes Nomi in Showgirls and Eve in All About Eve look like the pictures of sanity.

Calling this Miike's All About Eve is very much on point, though. One of my favorite moments in the film comes early on, when during a break one of the male actors admits to one of the female actors that he wishes that they could all live inside of the play -- pointedly this immediately follows them staging scenes where women are being treated like whores and chattel, abused and berated. The woman, a little stunned, says she's uhhh not so keen on that specific idea thank you very much. But that moment really gets to the film's thesis, I think -- it's about Japanese men (or you know, all straight men) romanticizing the patriarchy where they once had all the power; indeed the movie extends that to why stories like Yotsuya Kaidan keep getting told over and over and over again. It's about a neverending ritualization of the fantasy of abuse.

Of course Yotsuya Kaidan isn't that simple, given it's a ghost story where the wronged woman is able to enact some vengeance, and the ways in which Miike twists his meta narrative to his will are pretty delightful. And I don't want to spoil much more on it than I have already, so I'll stop here -- all I say is seek this movie out if you've never seen it. It's definitely a slow-burn and one of Miike's more subtle works... although using the word "subtle" given the number of decapitations on display does make me chuckle. Takashi Miike being subtle doesn't mean there won't be a ton of blood-spray!

This Call's For You, Sidney

I'm not going to get too thick into the weeds of the extra-filmic horrors that plagued this latest Scream movie except to say right up-front fuck the producers at Spyglass Entertainment to hell for firing Melissa Barrera for speaking the truth about Israel's ongoing genocide. Anybody who wants to boycott this movie because of that is right on -- in fact here's a good site where you can donate to aid for Palestinians; feel free to spend your money there instead of on tickets for this movie. That big bag of bullshit and Barrera's right to the freedom of speech to express such correct and necessary thoughts are far far more important than any slasher franchise.

Now... spinning around to give the movie a good review feels a bit turncoat, I'll own that. But what can I say -- I enjoyed the damn thing. You can feel the return of Kevin Williamson's voice -- this movie is simple, straightforward, and a shit ton of fun. Scream 7 feels like a return to the first two movies in that it's got that old-school buzzing energy to it -- genuine tension in the stalking scenes, a heap of nerdy callbacks to the past movies (Williamson apes several shots in the original, a movie I've seen so many times now it's fully burned into my brain, so I probably am well past being able to be fair and balanced here). 

It's also got some extreme gore, which I've seen some people pin onto the writers from the last two movies being on-board here but I dunno -- does no one remember Drew Barrymore's intestines hanging out as she hung from a tire-swing for her parents? The first movie has its gnarly-ass moments. Indeed one of the kills here feels like a mash-up of that with a scene from part 2 -- okay I could geek out about this sort of thing for awhile because there are a million references mixed up in here, but that's either 1) not fun for you or 2) it would be fun for you so I should leave you to experience it in the movie theater. So I'll refrain from going down that road. That said there's also a sequence that feels positively The-Burning-esque in its quick and bloody kill-count, which had me giddy. 

But I'm glad I'm not tasked with writing this up anywhere except here on my own little site so I can be as vague as I want to be on all of this -- no need to force myself to explain the plot or ruin any surprises. There's Sidney (Never Campbell), there's a Ghostface (or two), there's a bunch of teenagers getting knives plunged into their bellies while Sidney goes ape-shit with her gun-love (I remain uneasy with how much this franchise sees guns as instruments of heroes). I will say that the motive, when it's revealed, delighted me -- it's a perfect fit for the francise and very very funny. 

And that's the whole of it. I had fun. I left the theater with the same high I had from the first couple of films, which -- I didn't deeply hate the last two movies, not entirely (okay five was pretty bad but the last one was okay) but the magical Williamson touch was very much missing. You feel it, watching this. I've only glanced at the other reviews but I saw the opening Rotten Tomatoes score which is Not Good so I guess I'm going to be an outlier on this. Whatever. I'm right, of course.

Second 'Verse, Same as the First

The pervasive sense that the movement of Time has lost all meaning isn't just for our own individual sliding-down-the-shower-wall moments any more! The movies have taken notice! Time Loop Movies might be somewhat more prominent in Japanese cinema right now -- I think it must have been the one-two-punch success of One Cut of the Dead and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, which were then followed up by River and the upcoming horror flick Exit 8 (and I should note that every single movie I just mentioned is terrific and you should seek them all out). It's not like we haven't had our own love affair with this subgenre blooming in our cinematic margins, though -- look no further than the entire ouerve of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who've moved on up to the Marvel level of filmmaking after making a name for themselves with small-nudgeted mind-benders a la The Endless. 

Point being that while these sorts of movies have been around for ages they seem very hot right now if you know where to look, and where you should be looking is for the nearest theater playing writer-director-brothers Kevin and Matthew McManus' new movie Redux Redux, a wham-bammer or a brain-bender that's in theaters today. I missed it at Fantasia last summer but finally caught up with it this week and this should prove a calling-card of cinematic excellence for the filmmakers previously behind the unnerving horror The Block Island Sound. 

That movie also starred McManus sister Michaela, and here she turns up again to play our lead Irene, a broken woman who's taken to jumping through wormholes to chase down and murder the man who murdered her daughter -- and yeah okay so this is a multi-verse movie, not a time-travel movie, but it plays out basically the same as the process has becomes no less than a hyper-violent Groundhog Day for her. 

As in all of the previous movies mentioned the tech and special-effects are all lo-fi, battered and beaten crapola a la Ridley Scott's Alien freighter -- the focus remains on the way these science-fiction concepts are mangling with the emotions and mental-stability of our characters, and this quest that Irene is on is a doozy of one. Forcing her to re-live her trauma in an endless circle, violence begetting violence until the very idea of revenge reveals itself to be as empty and useless as it truly is. There can be no catharsis when her daughrter's killer inescapably remains in an infinite number of universes -- it's a brilliant way of showing that there is only sense in trying to fix ourselves, and that the monsters that haunt us will forever haunt us if we can't let them go or find some way to move on.

For Irene this comes in a couple forms -- she strikes up a sporadic one-sided love-affair with dreamy dude Jonathan (played by dreamy dude Jim Cummings), and she gets way too mixed up with another one of the victims of her daughter's killer, a young woman named Mia (Stella Marcus) who wants her own revenge. And to the filmmakers' extensive credit absolutely none of this plays out like we think it will -- their script swerves in all sorts of unexpected ways, managing to be an absolute thrill-ride while never losing sight of its profound emotional stakes. I'll just end with this -- if thoughtful genre movies like Redux Redux were what Hollywood was actually churning out right now we'd be so much better off. As movie-lovers, as a species. Go see this movie.   

How To Make a Killing in 500 Words or Less

Remember Scream Queens? The Ryan Murphy series that ran for two seasons a decade ago didn't rewrite the television medium but it's one of Murhpy's most entertaining efforts, goofy in a way that embraced Murphy's tendencies toward chaos -- the slapdash quality that sinks so much of his work was there a feature, not a bug. Anyway that was where I was introduced to Glen Powell as the dipshit hunk Chad Radwell, a perfect distillation of the actor's strengths right up front. That character's smugness wasn't meant to be charming... until it was, thanks to Powell's balls-deep performance. Point being I've been rooting for Powell all these years because he charmed me so fully right out of the gate. 

But the iteration of Glen Powell Movie Star that we have in 2026 has become a different beast altogether, and the limits of this current rictis-grin persona of Powell's meet and are beat by their match in John Patton Ford's How To Make a Killing (his follow-up to Emily the Criminal with Aubrey Plaza), out this weekend. What this movie -- which is based on the book Kind Hearts and Coronets, previously turned into a very fun movie with Alec Guinness in 1949 -- needs is a real asshole. Somebody who isn't desperately trying to be liked while also murdering his rich-prick relatives in order to get their wealth.

The actor who played Chad Radwell ten years ago maybe could've pulled this off. But Glen Powell V.2026 cannot. The movie works so hard trying to make his character Becket into a good guy -- despite all, you know, the killing shit -- that it deflates any and all of its satire, instead wandering around some unpleasant uncanny valley for two hours. Powell's face is frozen into an action-figure smirk for the entirety of this thing's runtime, and it's impossible not to wonder what an actor who was actually enjoying their slide into depravity might've brought -- an actor with an edge, somebody who brings a real sense of danger. A Jack O'Connell or LaKeith Stanfield could've rocked this.

The character really needs to have some crazy in his eyes; a sense that he's finally finding himself by discovering and embracing his monstrous lineage of rich shits. But both the movie itself and Powell keep backing off of that at every opportunity. There's no sense of developing tragedy or mounting lunacy -- it's just a bunch of stuff that happens, the end. And it's a genuine disappointment because the good version of this movie is so close, so possible, but it's just a series of self-owning stumbles instead. A cowardly trip, man.

Viva Filipiñana's Revolución

Yes I am still doing Sundance reviews! Lucky you people. Over the weekend my take on one of my favorites of the fest dropped -- click on over to Pajiba to read my thoughts on director Rafael Manuel's Filipiñana, a luxuriously filmed class satire set on an extremely hot day at a Filipino country club where the wealth and power disparity between the rich and the poor is baked to a crisp under the sun and the unpsaring glare of the camera. Really great movie and last week it was announced that the folks at Kino Lorber picked it up for a proper release this year so you will be able to see this one eventually! I'll keep my eyes out for it. Terrific flick. 

Come Undone Indeed

Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" is now in theaters and if you missed my review earlier this week you can read it right here. I loved it but as with all of Fennell's movies it's looking to be inexplicably divisive -- I've read dozens of think-pieces trying to explain to me why Fennell makes people so crazy at this point and they all seem like nonsense to me. Like here's somebody making extravagent and funny pop-entertainment that's ribbed for our pleasure with gorgeous creatures behaving badly and every single one of them gets met with this wave of hostile humorlessness over and over and over again. No matter how hard people make their case it will never compute for me. Anyway I 100% plan on re-watching Saltburn this Valentine's Weekend because what is Love if not Barry Keoghan's cock flopping in time to "Murder on the Dancefloor"? Oh and here's something else super cool -- I'm actually spending Valentine's Day itself camped out in the movie theaters of MoMA because they're screening two Park Chan-wook masterpieces back to back with Thirst and The Handmaiden. And, truly -- what is Love if it's not two gorgeous lesbians scissoring on a steam-ship after triumphantly murdering all of their enemies? Be gay do crime forever!

The Age of Elordi is Upon Us

If you were around here when Saltburn came out back in 2023 y'all know I loved Saltburn very very very much -- I also really liked Promising Young Woman (Carey Mulligan forever) and so I think it's safe to say that if the inevitable world civil war falls upon us and we're forced to take sides based on whether we like Emerald Fennell or not I will be one hundred thousand percent Team Fennell. I honestly think the people who get all bent out of shape about her are hella silly at this point. People get so angry about her! It's very weird! Anyway my side for the end times isn't switching now that Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" has landed -- I liked it a lot and my review just went up now at Pajiba so you can read all about it yourself. I'm not kidding when I say Jacob Elordi is really fantastic in this. He's really found his footing as an actor. The hunk thing we got previously, but actor-wise I'm fully sold now.  

Good Domhnall Day

Hello and happy Monday, readers. Coming to you mid-afternoon this day one of the week instead of the usual morning thingamajig because I had a screening this morning that I forgot I had until last night (see what it was here!) but otherwise let's just get on with it -- I've got another Sundance review up at Pajiba today -- click on over to read my thoughts on The Incomer, a sweet little dramedy starring Domhnall Gleeson that I enjoyed. As I previously mentioned there wasn't a lot that was "light" at this year's Sundance so I think this one felt like a big needed respite from all of the bad feels. Even as it dealt with suicidal ideation and feelings of isolation. You take what smiles you can find in 2026!

It Ain't Channing's Fault

I would just like to go on the record here upfront that I have been championing Channing Tatum as a talented actor for actual decades now -- I remember seeing him in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints in 2006 and thinking hey, that pretty boy can act. This is all to set off against my pan of his latest movie, the big Sundance winner Josephine, which you can read at Pajiba today -- as of right now I'm one of two negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and by all accounts (other) people really fucking loved this movie so I feel defensive. But I stand by what I said. Which is that this movie is tepid at best. Oh but Chan's not the problem -- he's perfectly respectable -- but since it feels weird to criticize child actors... ahem. I try to step around that as much as possible in my review. I still haven't entirely figured out how to write about what I see as actively bad child performances -- it seems best to lay the blame on those doing the directing and casting and editing when this sort of thing happens. But I'm in a very very very small minority on this one as of right now. This movie won Best U.S. Dramatic Feature AND the Audience Award at Sundance. I don't in the slightest get it but whatcha gonna do... besides post a hot picture of Chan and move it right along.

Whistle in 250 Words

I can be (when an unpredictable mood of  generosity finds me anyway) disgustingly easy to please when it comes to horror movies -- I have sat through far too many hours of bottom-of-the-barrel bullshit to not to be entertained by a movie that is at least competantly made. And so, with that level of "high praise" in mind, went Whistle. It's a bald tire of ideas whose rubber's been ripped off by every Final Destination movie before it -- with a good dose of Talk To Me to boot too -- but as angry and irritated as the movie often made me for its extraordinary plagiarisms of far better, funner previous materials, I still rode the dumb thing to its dumb end and I didn't feel totally dirty about it.

There are a couple of fun scenes -- the horror maze is well-staged with the movie's only genuinely likeable character in peril -- and there is one explosive set-piece of gore that I watched three times in a row, jaw agape. (You will know it when it hits you in the face with its viscera.) Corin Hardy isn't a bad director -- go see The Hallow if you haven't! -- but this is unfortunately closer to his limp Conjuring spin-off The Nun than it is to that original-concept creep-fest that gave him his career. But this will probably be the favorite for some 14-year-old new to the genre and as such my old, expired ass can't get too angry at it since that's who it's made for.

Whistle is in theaters tomorrow.

Sick in Mind and Body and Soul

So far we're three for three in using the word "Sundance" in today's posts at least once -- let's see if we can keep it up all day long! What a fun game that will be. For me. Only me. So my first Sundance (maybe we should all scream like it's the "word of the day" on Pee-wee's Playhouse?) review dropped yesterday -- it's of the erotic-thriller-ish film Night Nurse and you can read it right now at Pajiba. Or maybe you already read it yesterday -- I don't have a camera trained on your backside at all times, how would I know? Anyway it's a weird little movie and y'all know how weird's my bag so I dug it. Good movie from a first-time filmmaker!