Popular reviews

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  Review by Jim Cummings ★★★★★ 8

  Every family should have a governess that teaches the children and loves them and makes sure they're safe from the slutty ghosts of old.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 4

  What the fuck?

  Full discussion on ep 218 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by Aaron ★★★★★ 34

  Part of Hoop-Tober

  “But they haven’t been good, merely easy to live with.”

  Beware the well-read virgin. So the saying goes. The imagination will be well lubricated by the endless tomes over which she has pored. She will know of the world, but will not be a part of it—what is worse, she will see this as a virtue rather than a liability. Hers will be a conviction that treats faith as the evidence of things unseen, an unseemly melding of hope and conclusion and fancy into an irrefutable approximation of truth. She will insist upon nothing but the best from people, and will assume nothing but the worst.

  Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr, in a tour de force performance) is…

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  Review by allain ★★★★★ 14

  This is peak ambiguity in cinematic form. Derived from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents is a psychological horror film revolving around a governess slowly losing her mind as she thinks that the children she is taking care of are being possessed by the dead. The profound music score and the prepossessing cinematography transformed the 1898 novella into, dare I say, the most equivocal film to date, touching subjects like seclusion and sexual repression in a contentious yet terrifying manner. The lingering uncanny shots can drive someone’s claustrophobia to a maximum and the ending posed multiple symbolisms that was left for the audience to comprehend. Deborah Kerr’s performance was incredibly moving and phenomenal, rivaling her prodigious Black Narcissus act. The formidable phantasmal superimpositions can put anyone on the edge of their seat. An underrated must-watch if you’re into enigmatic psychological horror films.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 4

  A story about a haunted estate swallowing children or a sexually repressed weirdo (who loves kids a bit too much) violently projecting her overprotective fantasies onto them? Regardless, would be my first pick towards a problematic age gap canon. Also has some of the best cinemascope and b&w photography of all time.

  Full discussion on ep 218 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 8

  100

  Orgasmic. A stifling scream of sexual release and emerging demons. The greatest CinemaScope film - with Victorian "larger at night" chambers and hallways enclosing their grasp on the suffocated. Let go.

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  Review by kailey ★★★★ 7

  me: decides to watch a legendary horror movie

  legendary horror movie: is scary

  me: shocked pikachu face

  ghosts don't haunt places, they haunt people. forgive me a disagreement but i think they haunt both. from the beginning, there's something just a little off about the governess hired to take care of two orphaned children by their uncaring uncle. she's a little fluttery, a little too old to be unmarried, a little too eager to prove that she truly does love and cherish children. from the beginning, there's something a little off about the house she arrives at to begin her duties. there's a lake and a gazebo and too many rooms and far too many candles. there's something empty and…

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★½ 19

  Cements my belief that certain movies can only be made during certain times. The Innocents is perhaps the most emblematic film I have seen of its period, a late-modernist work clinging on to its roots but on the verge of spilling over into early post-, inheriting the ghosts of what it depicts (sometimes quite literally) and contending with it in a knowingly-outmoded frame of mind that just isn't ready for what's around the corner. And so it heightens its dying roots, its predilection for Victorian vernacular and regimented social hierarchies a relic of the bygone but a comforting one still, not yet ready to let go even while everything else disintegrates. Post-modernism intrudes into the frame as a reminder that…

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  Review by eely 🎄 ★★★½

  i’d much rather have a ghost in my house than a child and you can quote me on that!

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  Review by Tony the Terror 🎃 ★★★★★ 4

  One of the most genuinely devastating films I’ve ever seen. A slow descent into complete madness. Malicious spirits in the house. Malicious spirits in the mind. The trauma of sexual repression. The corruption of innocence. True horror. Every time I watch this I find it far more frightening than any traditional supernatural tale and I wonder how it doesn’t sit on the same top shelf as say, The Exorcist or Psycho.

  Powerhouse performance from Deborah Kerr and young Martin Stephens. I had forgotten that a very young Pamela Franklin was also in this! A true classic if there ever was one. I can’t recommend this one enough.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½

  “I can’t judge you, Miss. A body can only judge themselves.”

  everything that's wrong with modern horror movies, and then some. the new Criterion blu-ray is a thing to behold, i tell ya. full review on the AV Club next week.

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  Review by Ethan 🎄 ★★★★★ 2

  JUST THROW THE WHOLE KID AWAY