#52LGBTQFilms 2018 pt. 44.

Ironically, I guess, for a movie that tries so hard to be retro, this one screams 2018. Stylistically it's a summation of everything that has been trendy in art films lately, mixed with everything that's been trendy in horror films lately, like it's A24: The Movie or some shit. It's undoubtedly long, but it didn't feel too long, and Tilda Swinton is all kinds of amazing (I mean, at least three kinds of amazing amirite?). On…

#52FilmsByWomen 2018 pt. 45.

I don't usually worry about spoilers when I write letterboxd reviews, but this is a film that I think a viewer would be best served by seeing with a minimum of foreknowledge. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to know that this is a werewolf movie, since even viewers who have not seen the poster will be cued into that fact pretty early on. But there is something that happens at the midpoint which,…

The film that opened my eyes to Tobe Hooper's brilliance was neither The Texas Chain Saw Massacre nor Poltergeist (though I had previously seen both) but rather Toolbox Murders. I was 18 years old, living with my parents and unemployed, having withdrawn from college after a disastrous first semester. It was the beginning of a four-year spiral of depression, isolation and substance abuse: the darkest period of my life thus far.

I rented Toolbox Murders from my local Hollywood Video…

God bless Mike Flanagan. Hush was, as I suspected, more of an experiment/trifle than a sincere piece of work, and now he's back with another gem that deals in true auteuristic style with his pet obsessions: how we process grief and loss, the unseen forces that surround us, how the past infects the present. And it's impeccably made; somebody needs to grab whoever directed Annabelle and say. "THIS is how you make a horror film set in the '60s!"

In…