2018 Ranked
Seen in Theaters

Bad Times at the El Royale finds writer/director Drew Goddard working in familiar territory. After his successful deconstruction of horror movie tropes in Cabin in the Woods, he returns with a film that deconstructs the crime/mystery genre. Using a familiar set up – a group of strangers arriving at an odd hotel – he sets up multiple MacGuffins, plots, and subplots. All the while, the situation at the El Royale continues to devolve, with Goddard…

Complete with cold rooms, unexplainably drafty stairs, and doors that shut on their own, British director Lewis Allen‘s The Uninvited is a truly groundbreaking horror film. Until The Uninvited, the supernatural was largely written off in film, portrayed as either psychological delusion or as played for comedic effect. Lewis Allen changed this with The Uninvited, embracing the supernatural as something terrifyingly real. Portraying a séance in which someone is possessed by a spirit, ghostly voices in the night, and actual…

25 Films x 8 Decades: 1970s

The Getaway has a rather simple conceit. Sam Peckinpah spruces it up as he is known to do, but its central plot is rather straightforward. A man, Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen), is in prison. He refuses to play ball with an influential prison figure and help him with a few heists, so the guy influences the parole board to not let Doc go. Having a charge of heart, Doc sends his wife Carol (Ali…

2018 Ranked
Seen in Theaters

Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley) was a woman who refused to be held back. A brilliant writer who set Paris ablaze with her scandalous and salacious novels, Colette may have been forced to hand her work over to husband Willy (Dominic West), but she was hardly conventional. Not only did she fight to be her husband’s equal, but she fought for her own individuality. She was not content to just live in her husband’s shadow, instead…

2011 Ranked

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. When I saw Drive for the first time in 2013, I had just finished my first film class in high school and was set to graduate from high school in a few weeks. Now, a week and a half removed from finishing college a semester early, it was time to atone for the sins of my youth. Unacquainted with good films at the time aside from the ones I saw in…