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The thing to like about The Black Phone 2 is how it expands the canvas rather than simply tracing over the elements and plot points of its 2021 predecessor. The earlier film worked primarily because its suspense, dread, and level of viewer engagem...

The Black Phone is a throwback to a time when horror was more about fear and suspense than blood and gore. Oh, there’s some of the latter in the movie but far too little to sate the appetites of those who attend the genre purely to be entomb...

"In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found." With this ominous pronouncement on a title card, The Blair Witch Project begi...

For writer/director Steve McQueen, whose previous films have included the likes of Shame and 12 Years a Slave, Blitz represents an almost conventional turn. Although the movie includes a subtext related to the class and race divisions evident in L...

Blue Velvet is David Lynch in peak form, and represents (to date) his most accomplished motion picture. It is a work of fascinating scope and power that rivals any of the most subversive films to reach the screens during the '80s. For Lynch, the ...

For many years, the narrative existed that Hollywood didn’t understand how to make a good Stephen King movie. Oh, there were counterexamples and The Shining has its supporters (the author is not among them) but the prevailing mantra went somethi...

The Brady Bunch Movie, the natural culmination of a '90s revisionist Brady fad, is part homage and part parody. It takes the inimitable clan of eight and time-transports them, '70s attitudes and dress style intact, into 1995. Instead of being reg...

At first glance, Brave seems much like an old-fashioned animated Disney princess film done using new-fangled technology. Most of the elements are in place: the plucky heroine, the faithful animal companion, a mysterious wizard, and a character-buil...

The usual function of the "revenge flick" is to allow the viewer to vicariously experience the brutal pleasure of executing that "dish best served cold." It's a basic case of good versus evil, with the former striking back against the latter. The...