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Maitland McDonagh

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Maitland McDonagh, the former Senior Movies Editor of TV Guide, is the author of four books on film: the landmark “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento,” “Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good, the Bad and the Deviant Directors,” “The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time” and “Movie Lust.” A specialist in horror and erotica, she was inducted into the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards Hall of Fame in 2022 as “a trailblazer who makes a difference.”

Location:

New York, USA

Official Website:

https://maitlandonmovies.substack.com/

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
House of Ashes (2025) 71% EDIT “Her movie has visual style to spare — colorful, vertiginous, even seemingly gialli-inspired at times — and it has a strong point of view of the terrible topicality of the attacks on women’s bodily autonomy.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 30, 2025 Full Review Shelby Oaks (2023) 56% EDIT “[A] skillfully made pastiche of horror-movie tropes and influences. Writer-director-producer Christopher Stuckmann ... both knows and loves the genre. Unfortunately, "Shelby Oaks" is also a slow burn that doesn’t deliver an incendiary payoff. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 23, 2025 Full Review Frankenstein (2025) 85% EDIT “[A]n impressive achievement. ... [D]el Toro’s Frankenstein is steeped in death and, like the cream of the movie crop, driven by the creature. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 16, 2025 Full Review Death Line (1972) 87% EDIT “RAW MEAT isn’t just going for the shocks...but aims to capture a real sense of a sociopolitically fractured time. ... [It] is both eerie and deeply sad, with a more heartbreaking poignancy than one would ever expect from a film of this [U.S-release] title” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 9, 2025 Full Review Coyotes (2025) 60% EDIT “Sitting on the classier side of this [nature-strikes-back horror] subgenre, COYOTES ... plays its hand well: The coyotes are just being coyotes — they’re not a genetic-engineering experiment gone wrong.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 2, 2025 Full Review V/H/S Halloween (2025) 92% EDIT “[H]andsomely produced, well-acted and creepy[,]...even the couple that are a bit "Tales from the Crypt"-ish, albeit if "Tales from the Crypt" had gotten a spectacular deal on corn-syrup blood and pig intestines. ... [T]here isn’t a weak link in the chain.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 1, 2025 Full Review Good Boy (2025) 90% EDIT “[The fim is] unsettling without overshadowing the delicate veil of melancholy that surrounds Todd ... [and] more wistful and bittersweet than it is morbid. It’s a story not only of things that go bump in the night, but of the cold nose that bumps back.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 25, 2025 Full Review Dead of Winter (2025) 76% EDIT “Set in a cold blue rural Minnesota, 'Dead of Winter' is an accomplished blend of conventional thriller and Midwestern quirk. ... [Director Brian Kirk's] steely, unblinking eye distracts from anything the plot doesn’t address or glosses over.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 23, 2025 Full Review Hard Eight (1996) 82% 2.5/5 EDIT “Ultimately, the material is so familiar that it's hard to work up any enthusiasm for another trip [through] the seamy underside of glittering gaming life. ” – TV Guide Sep 22, 2025 Full Review Night of the Reaper (2025) 79% EDIT “[I]t delivers a convincing sense of time and place and, de rigueur, some bloody murders. It isn’t one for the ages, but hardcore Halloween buffs might want to give it a slot in their annual spooktacular movie-marathon lineup.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 18, 2025 Full Review Queen of Manhattan (2022) EDIT “[S]et during the adult-film industry’s golden age, some 12 to 15 years of primarily the ‘70s with a bit of ‘60s and ‘80s on either end ... it’s a nicely evocative trip back to that rightly fabled time and place. If anything, it’s not gritty *enough*.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 17, 2025 Full Review The Long Walk (2025) 88% EDIT “[T]he walkers progress through stages of mentality and personality that eventually takes each to their core. I wouldn’t call it "My Dinner with Andre" on a forced march, but it’s much more psychologically literate than one might expect from the premise...” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 11, 2025 Full Review The Man in My Basement (2025) 40% EDIT “[T]he shifting psychological/sociopolitical landscape [is] clear but not overstated... Kudos to the cast, notably Dafoe and Hawkins; if the story had been played as a spare two-hander...in a single room I suspect they could have made it equally compelling” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 9, 2025 Full Review The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) 59% EDIT “Wilson and Farmiga are old-school troupers, professionals to the core who ... bring a lot to the table.... [But t]he more horror movies you’ve seen, the less impressed you’re likely to be, despite the admirable polish of the execution.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 5, 2025 Full Review Somnium (2024) 81% EDIT “Cain is a director to keep an eye on. Her gorgeous visual sense is stronger than her solid but not-quite-polished script ... [b]ut I’ve no doubt she’ll smoothen things in whatever her next screenplay is and I look forward to it.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 28, 2025 Full Review Lurker (2025) 95% EDIT “Through vibrant performances...and neophyte Russell’s confident yet restrained direction... the film transforms a recognizable obsession narrative into something that speaks to a larger cultural shift in ordinary people’s public presentation of themselves” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 21, 2025 Full Review Went Up the Hill (2024) 69% EDIT “[T]his atmospheric and unexpectedly disturbing ghost story transgresses across themes of abandonment, fucked-up eroticism, fucked-up homoeroticism and mesmerizingly fucked-up narcissism. And I use “fucked-up” in the most approvingly holy-shit way possible” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 14, 2025 Full Review Weapons (2025) 93% EDIT “'Weapons' excels at what I go to horror movies for: not the jump scares or splatter effects but that niggling creepiness that worms its way into your brain and makes itself at home.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 8, 2025 Full Review Ziam (2025) 83% EDIT “I enjoyed 'Ziam' partly because it’s a departure from the zombie lore I’ve known since I was a child and partly because it’s fast-paced, good-looking and, without slowing down the narrative, invests enough in the main characters that you care [about] them” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Aug 7, 2025 Full Review Together (2025) 90% EDIT “[A]s an oozing and dripping, leaking and creeping example of body horror, Australian writer-director Michael Shanks’ movie resonates beautiful-ugly in your mind’s eye in a way that would do Cronenberg, the prince of body horror, proud.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 29, 2025 Full Review Abigail (2023) EDIT “Abigail is at its core a stalk-and-slash movie that doesn’t have much to add to the genre… that said, kudos to the truly creepy B&W credits sequence.” – AWFJ.org Jul 25, 2025 Full Review Monster Island (2024) 63% EDIT “I confess, I found 'Monster Island' fun. Is this movie going to shift my perspective on anything? No. But it’s a good time at the flicks and the creepy creature design is convincingly bipedal, gilled and scaly.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 24, 2025 Full Review I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) 36% EDIT “...simultaneously ordinary and confoundingly plotted.... [T]he attenuated ending has the stamp of audience-test reshoots, which isn’t bad in and of itself but in this case created new plot problems with looped-in dialog near the end. I mean, why? ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 17, 2025 Full Review Tenebrae (1982) 82% EDIT “Argento fashions a shifty, misleading piece of storytelling, one that pivots in a huge way two-thirds through.... [The movie's] outwardly neat and tidy world is no such thing. Its sleek and shiny surface lies lightly over a world of bloody chaos.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 11, 2025 Full Review Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) 50% EDIT “I get that it’s popcorn movie with a sliver of a message about the dangers of genetic engineering ... [and] I hope and trust it will entertain many people. But overall, it’s a *kaigu eiga* — monsters stomp Tokyo et al. — made on a massive budget.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jul 1, 2025 Full Review
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