Smiling Friends season 3 (2025)
Animation-wise episode six is the greatest, one of multiple agency origin stories.
Beef House (2020)
Pretty good fake sitcom. The People’s Joker director worked on this.
Tag: 2020s
Exit 8 (2025, Genki Kawamura)
Long-take digital cinema about people stuck in an endless videogame maze of subway tunnels. Not since A Quiet Place has a movie spelled out its rules this clearly on signage, and not since Cube has the puzzle been solved by a late-arriving autistic guy (a kid, in this case).
When a body meet a body passing through the tile. I picked the poster behind them as anomaly, but Escher’s first name really was Maurits:
You have to go through the loop correctly (turn back if you see anomaly, proceed if not) eight times in a row. We switch perspectives from Guy 1 to Kid to Guy 2. Each guy has parental anxiety and they keep stopping to get emotional or else the movie would be shorter. I liked the loop concept more than the psychological details. One run is all anomalies, peaking in an Atonement tunnel flood.
Is God Is (2026, Aleshea Harris)
Good production design – I thought about The Black Phone which opens “DENVER 1978” and spends the next 90 minutes painstakingly creating Denver in 1978, while this one feels free to follow its own rules (they drive a 1970s car, use modern music and speech, nobody has cellphones).
Scarred twin sisters (from Kindred and I’m a Virgo) meeting their real mom Vivica A. Fox for the first time in memory, she says your dad ruined our lives. They track him via a mute strongman lawyer who pays people to beat him up (Don King in Ali) and find he’s got a new life with battered hotwife Janelle Monae and perfect twin boys. The girls follow their path and kill everybody. I didn’t think it was necessary for the dad to grab Racine while he’s burning to death, but I guess revenge is gonna have a cost.
Hokum (2026, Damian McCarthy)
Movie’s lesson is to bring a cutting tool wherever you go, and that despite The Monkey we should continue making Adam Scott horror movies. McCarthy’s Oddity was a slow burn with a delicious ending, he follows it up with a mostly fun movie with a bum ending, oh well.
Adam is an ornery writer staying at a rural hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes and/or finish his dreary conquistador novel and/or commit suicide. When he gets out of the hospital the hotel is closing for the season, the girl who’d rescued him is missing, and everyone suspects Psilocybin Jerry (David Wilmot of every Irish movie, also sinister boss of Little Joe) of kidnapping her but nobody can find Jerry (Adam strolls up to Jerry’s van and there he is).
I got a couple guys named Fergal and Mal mixed up, but obviously if one character is named Mal he’s the killer. Later on Mal has stuffed the girl in a dumbwaiter, shot Jerry with a crossbow and locked Adam in the burning hotel, all of which is complicated by ghosts in the honeymoon suite and witches in the cellar. Not only is the attempted real-world explanation of Adam’s spooky ordeals bad (he was drugged all along), they also try to make us care about the amended ending of his novel.
The Black Phone (2021, Scott Derrickson)
Set in 1978 Denver, this is one of those movies where the bulk of the effort was put not into scares or the story making sense, but in lovingly recreating 1978 Denver. Young “Albert” Finney is a bullied baseballer schoolkid with a typically drunk/abusive dad (Jeremy Davies of Spanking the Monkey), when all the kids in town start getting abducted by Ethan Hawke, who then grabs Finney. Now the kid has to escape from the basement before he gets murdered.
Best part of the movie is Grabber’s mask, which has a different expression every time we see it. Worst part is the titular phone, through which the kid’s dead classmates call and offer clues that help him escape, while the police are being as useless as they were in Weapons. Why did Grabber even install that ghost phone down there? Glad to see Ziggy as Grabber’s brother, a conspiracy nut who lives above the child-dungeon and gets killed for discovering it (?). I was only half paying attention, playing with my new glasses. Derrickson initiated the direct-to-DVD era of the Hellraiser franchise, and this is at least his second Ethan Hawke missing-children serial-killer movie after Sinister.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)
Self-analyzing cinema, Scream without the thrills. Kids in the Hall sense of humor with stunt-cast harbinger Kevin McDonald. “There is a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.” Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th both exist within this movie, they’re both mentioned, but they’re also ripped off (Friday sequel titles, Sleepaway closing shot) by the fake Miasma franchise. The middle quarter of this is just Camp Miasma Part 1, featuring a long-take massacre to Counting Crows’ A Long December, which has never felt longer: digital kills combined with film texture and VHS love (return of the Videodrome flesh slot from TV Glow). I liked it, of course – the fantasy of going inside your favorite horror franchise to make out with Gillian Anderson.
Prey (2022, Dan Trachtenberg)
Extreme amount of leveling-up here. She fights a lion, fights a bear, invents a new way to throw an axe, invents a grappling hook to save herself from quickswamp, learns from everyone else’s mistakes, masters her own weapons, fights French trappers, learns the white man’s weapons, learns the alien’s weapons, then defeats the alien using all these tools and skills.
Amber Midthunder is from X-Men spinoff Legion, where she shares a body with Bill Irwin. Trachtenberg is good – he made my favorite Black Mirror, Cloverfield, and now Predator. I haven’t seen the original in 35 years and still caught a couple of direct callbacks – one cool and one irksome. People online complain about the CG animals, and I’m a big hater of those but didn’t mind it here – it’s very high-energy, and how else is an actor gonna fight a lion?
Obsession (2025, Curry Barker)
First the Spielberg and now this: the summer movies love to reference The Rehearsal. It’s never subtle either – our guy is delivering his romantic confession to a stranger, practicing to unleash the real thing on his bar trivia friend. The point is to set up how hopelessly awkward he is, so terribly bad at verbal communication (and decisions in general) that he can barely make a phone call or talk to his actual friends, so when things get uncomfortably supernaturally murdery, he’s even worse. The movie gets in a couple of good jokes about this, but unfortunately it’s a pretty dialogue-heavy story and we’re stuck with him for the endurance. Hopefully the kids will get over their love of terrible awkwardness and we can swing back to coherence.
Should Obsession 2 be Stick-and-Stacks or ChromaScope?
Great performance by Inde Navarrette, the bar trivia friend who becomes a horrifyingly clingy girlfriend after Bar Trivia Bear makes a wish that she’d love him. Apparently the real Inde is locked away in some hell dimension, replaced by the singlemindedly obsessed Girlfriend Inde until one of them dies. I noted the early setup of “I’ve got pills that’ll kill you” and “I know where dad keeps his gun” sidelined for 80 minutes, until they become Bear’s prime suicide options. The wishing thing is great, folding the supernatural into the everyday as smoothly as Weapons did. Best friends/casualties include the cute smart girl who actually likes him, and his doofy bestie Cooper – fortunately only young people get butchered, so Andy Richter is left alone.
Apparently there was much discourse, and most people (Sicinski, Marsh) disliked it, but my most trustworthy horror guy Adam Nayman said it was pretty good, so I watched it on the exercise bike, and it was pretty good.
Time and Water (2026, Sara Dosa)
Icelandic writer digresses about the loss of glaciers in the world, tells us his parents’ life story, and you can tell he’s self-satisfied about some plaque he wrote about a particular extinct glacier since they take their time building up to it. Pretty good as an essay film, pretty funny that Dosa followed her fire movie with an ice movie, and ultimately the incredible glacier photography put this over the top.
