Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Strange Darling 2023

  Watched 31 Aug 2024

  I have not been cooking with enough butter.

• 

  Grim Prairie Tales 1990

  ★★½ Watched 16 Nov 2022

  Honestly, only one of the four stories is particularly memorable, and even that one it's just the last thirty seconds. But they all have an adequately spooky western horror atmosphere and they move by quick enough that they never keep us too long from the real highlight: hanging out around the fire with Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones.

Popular reviews

• 

  The Changeling 1980

  ★★★½ Watched 05 Nov 2022

  A haunted house movie crossed with a TV murder mystery. More spooky than scary for the most part, getting a lot of atmosphere out of the dreary PNW winter*. George C. Scott gives a spectacular performance, grounding everything in the experience of a quietly grieving father and giving an otherwise small-scale story a real emotional weight.

  Has the best seance I've seen in a movie, which more than makes up for the ridiculous wheelchair scene.

  *The one thing it gets wrong is we keep hearing thunder in the background, which is not something that happens in Seattle.

• 

  The Murmuring 2022

  ★★★ Watched 31 Oct 2022

  There's nothing surprising here, but that's fine. What we get is a familiar but well crafted ghost story with some effectively frightening scenes and a satisfying emotional payoff, dressed up with some nice ornithological details.

  Also, got to hand it to whoever decided that murmurations would be a good subject for a streaming movie. At one point a character reads a poem describing them as a "drunken fingerprint rolling across the sky" but what we get is more a drunken finger smudging the lens. The compression just murders all of the small intricate details that make them beautiful.

Following