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My review of John Krasinski’s 2018 A Quiet Place called the movie “a superb exercise in understated terror that puts to shame ‘horror’ films that rely on jump scares and cheap theatrics.” It was one of the best films of the year and ...

For movies like A Quiet Place – science fiction-based horror films that aren’t obsessed with appealing to the Blumhouse demographic – tone and atmosphere are the most critical production aspects. This is something Ridley Scott understood...

Numerous movies about grief miss the mark by a wide margin, sliding down a slippery slope of schlocky melodrama with overacting performers failing to convince us that their tears are real. Every once in a while, however, a film gets it right. In ...

Red Eye belongs to the genre in which a director attempts to sustain a heightened level of suspense for long enough that the audience will not notice how incredibly stupid the screenplay is. Alfred Hitchcock was a master at this - although some of...

The last time Nicolas Cage bared his fangs – in 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss – his performance was widely criticized (and, in some circles, praised) for being outlandishly campy. Now, some 35 years later, Cage has channeled the same zany zeitgeis...

Repo Men feels like it was cobbled together using pieces of other, often better motion pictures. I could provide a list of titles but it would be more comprehensive simply to state that if a movie is set on a less-than-optimistic future Earth, some...

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, based on the novel by Alvin Schwartz (with illustrations by Stephen Gammell), is three-fourths of a good horror movie and one-fourth disappointing. The film, constructed as a series of episodic vignettes conn...

Scream is a rarity: a horror movie spoof that succeeds almost as well at provoking scares as laughs. That's because director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street), in addition to having a genuine affection for the genre, understands how wildly...

Scream 2 isn't quite as clever as its predecessor, but it fills the gap with a cutting wit. Death -- even gruesome, bloody death -- can be funny if handled the right way (some will be offended by this statement, but you need look no further than P...

They say the third time's a charm. In the case of the Scream movie series, the Wes Craven/Kevin Williamson collaboration credited for having revived the slasher genre in the '90s, this cliché proves to be a falsehood. The most recent (and hopefu...