Fred Durst ripping a kid's head out of an exploding tv screen wasn't on my 2024 bingo card. But I must say, it might be the best thing I've seen all year.

The neon pinks and swampy greens remind me not only of a kind of cosmic static, but also of a healing bruise. That's the image I just couldn't shake. A bruise --- a blooming subcutaneous wound struggling to filter out life's trauma with the same desperate gargle as…

PTA's best. Hands down. There's just so much to admire here.

Firstly, I'm completely taken by Kriep's performance, her naturalism, the way that she captures delight, how quickly she's capable of returning to it... it's so clear that this character wants to be joyous, so much so that she is almost eager to contort herself in unnatural ways to find happiness.

And I love all the moments where Alma finds agency, where she inserts herself into the record, corrects it,…

***Sundance 2025***

Eva Victor is an absolute star. There's a casual precision to her naturalism, one that screams intelligence---emotional and otherwise. Her humor is somehow both cutting and silly, a sword and a shield that comes not from a defensive place, but from a wounded one. And that's just in front of the camera. Behind it, she lingers in all the right places, hangs on all the right reactions, and deploys every tool in the director's toolkit to inject meaning…

***Sundance 2025***

Supernatural horror is at its best when it transforms something felt into something seen, when it wrestles a process or idea out of abstraction and plants it firmly on the screen.

Michael Shanks' directorial debut does just that.

Literalizing codependency. Smart. And such a rich sandbox for riffing on the toxicity that creeps into even the most well-intentioned relationships. The damage of being drawn but feeling quartered. The disassociation that accompanies compulsion. The weird wounds we give and…

This might be the strangest possible way to depict such a thoughtful idea.

A hermaphroditic Pope. Dan Brown, eat your heart out. There's something both soulful and silly about this reveal, something deep and cheap about what it's trying to say.

At first, I thought this was a case of simple cross-dressing. Then, of something surgical. So I suppose, of all the available riffs on this revelation, I'm happy the story landed where it did, anchored in anomaly.

Part of…

Big fan of the first half---its tone, its tension.

Out the gate, the craft is the standout. The shot composition alone does so much to activate our spidey-sense. The framing feels purposeful and restrained, casting unassuming doors and doorways as devilish danger-filled portals. Honestly, I don't think I've ever spent this much time looking over someone else's shoulder before. Plus, there's some really top notch cinematography on the screen. The pre-headshot steeples, the payphone-adjacent split-level staircase, the beaming hayloft windows---someone…