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Heart Eyes (2025)
Pretty clever mix of slasher and rom-com tropes that, while not a game changer to any degree, is novel enough to help keep the slasher genre going another decade. Slasher films in recent years have been moving more towards comedy than ever before. Post-Scream (1996), these movies were almost always ironic or self-aware to some…
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Black Phone 2 (2025)
About five years after siblings Gwen and Finn defeated the Grabber, a serial killer targeting boys in their neighbourhood, they’re both still troubled by the events. Finn self-medicates with marijuana, while Gwen has dreams of a phone call being made by a Christian camp counsellor in the late 1950s, talking about numbers written on ice…
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A Real Pain (2025)
I just saw A Real Pain and it was good. It’s a Holocaust dramedy about New York cousins played by Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg (also the writer/director) who go on a Jewish heritage tour in Poland to honour their late grandmother. It’s a funny, moving, and refreshingly compact film, reminiscent of Woody Allen for…
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Companion (2025)
I just saw Companion and it was really good, a clever and comic satirical take on the classic feminist horror The Stepford Wives, the one where post-sexual revolution men replace their strong and intelligent wives with automatons who wax floors in pinnies all day. It’s tough to synopsise Companion, which comes on the heels of Barbarian (2022). (It shares with that…
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Nosferatu (2024)
I just saw Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and it was stupid crap. I was going to be kind and call it a mixed bag, but by the end of the film I had no impulse to be kind. It’s intriguing in its premise in that it’s based not so much on Bram Stoker’s original novel as…
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The Exterminator (1980)
The Exterminator is basically a vetsploitation take on the slasher; “vetsploitation” being a sub-genre of the exploitation film wherein Vietnam veterans and their experiences/traumas were used as material for screenplays. Just like in a slasher, a cold open informs what follows before the story structures itself around a series of murders carried out by its…
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Conclave (2024)
I just saw Conclave and it was great. Based on a novel by Robert Harris, it deals with the sequestering period in the Catholic Church when a pope dies and the cardinals must elect their successor. Ralph Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Thomas Lawrence, a stoic and serious man caught up…
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Heretic (2024)
“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” This quote from Edgar Allan Poe opens John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), but is arguably more applicable to Heretic, the new horror film for Halloween 2024, starring Hugh Grant as an oddball who hosts a couple of young Mormon missionaries straight out…
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The Coffee Table (2022)
A husband, Jesus (pronounced Hey-Zeus, played by David Pareja), and wife, Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), with their newborn baby, are looking to buy a coffee table. The table is composed of two nude women in faux-gold trim supporting a glass top. Clearly, it belongs in a bachelor pad as opposed to a young couple’s…
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Terrifier 3
The basic appeal of the Terrifier films is that they’re of the same crude simplicity as the Friday the 13th franchise (1980 to 2009, as of Halloween 2024) and other Golden Age slashers, but with much more gore that you couldn’t get away with back then. It’s amusing to think of how slashers of yore were pilloried…
I Just Saw
Telling you about movies I just saw
I Just Saw 