
EVERLY: Fantastic Fest Review
There is something to be said for walking into something without expectations. I wasn’t expecting much from Everly, I had no clear conception of what the film might be. The plot description was vague enough

ELECTRIC BOOGALOO Fantastic Fest Review
Electric Boogaloo completes Mark Hartley’s trilogy on the secret history of exploitation cinema in fine fashion. Like Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed, it’s a talking heads doc that blends limited archival footage, scandalous

JOHN Wick Fantastic Fest Review
Get ready to party like its 1995. Remember how it was after Pulp Fiction came out? When suddenly a gangster film couldn’t just be a gangster film? When suddenly everyone had to speak and behave

HORNS Fantastic Fest Review
The trick to reading Joe Hill‘s Horns is to understand that it is a farce rather than a horor novel for most of its page count. That makes Horns something of a tricky proposition for

Fantastic Fest Interview With David Robert Mitchell
To say I loved David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is something of an understatement. I’ve become evangelical about it. Stopping just short of accosting random strangers on the street. So I was understandably excited to

Dispatches From Fantastic Fest: The Tale Of Princess Kaguya
Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement received plenty of press attention this year, being one of the most beloved filmmakers in the world will tend to have that effect. The fact that Isao Takahata also made what will

Dispatches From Fantastic Fest: It Follows
Horror as a genre has become so self reflexive that it threatens to make itself obsolete out of love. I feel like with Cabin In The Woods the genre genuinely reached the point where the

Dispatches From Fantastic Fest: Tusk
Tusk opens with a disaster; a video that starts as a gag and ends with a cataclysmic fuck up. Tusk itself follows suit. A film that starts out on the usual level of genial Kevin

Dispatches From Fantastic Fest: No Man’s Land
No Man’s Land plays like a Sichuan version of Jim Thompson (with a soupcon of James M. Cain). It begins as a fairly standard story of an amoral lawyer who receives some long due comeuppance

GRAVITY FALLS “Sock Opera” Review
As I wrote in my earlier reviews the two elements that make Gravity Falls a genuinely great all ages show, as opposed to a fun diversion of a cartoon, is its strongly rooted characters and

THE BONE CLOCKS: Book Review
“Think larger. Redraw what is possible.” The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell These words come from the mouth of a villain in Bone Clocks, but if they’re not engraved above David Mitchell’s writing desk they should be.

ARROW SEASON 2 Blu-ray Review
Season One of Arrow ended on a fairly ballsy note, not with its hero triumphant but a failure on pretty much every possible level. While most first seasons let their protagonists go out with a

THE STRAIN “Loved Ones” Episode Recap
“Loved Ones” ended up being another wheel spinner for The Strain, though at least it didn’t feature a misstep as egregious as the reveal of The Master’s design (coincidentally The Master’s one big appearance this

THE DROP – Book Review
The Drop is probably destined to be regarded as minor Lehane, but even a minor work by one of the best storytellers writing today is more than worth paying attention to.