May 2026

This movie’s not for me, and there is so much of it, but Lord and Miller’s reliable charm sustained me even if it didn’t satisfy me. Some science nerd has probably mansplained why they didn’t visibly age Ryan Gosling like they did Sandra Hüller, but I will continue to disapprove.

This franchise took a left turn when a weird cult in blonde wigs showed up at the very end of last year’s adequate-at-best 28 Years Later. It was a conspicuously goofy addendum, and it feels even less natural when the psychotic, Teletubbies-obsessed cult takes center stage in this direct sequel, roaming the post-apocalyptic British countryside looking for un-zombified victims to carve up in Satanic sacrifice. Elsewhere on the island, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, both… See more →

I had a great time with this one. I wish I had gotten it together to see it in a crowded theater. I also wish its office politics were less generic, and that its crummy digital effects weren’t one more drop in the ocean of reasons I’m convinced computers were a mistake. But man, it had been way too long since we had a fresh opportunity to picture Sam Raimi cackling from behind the camera… See more →

For his 50th birthday, my buddy Chris Shiflett wrote a lovely post chronicling the ups and downs of his life in technology. We participate in tech in different ways but approach it with the same spirit, so I found a lot to identify with, and I enjoyed remembering the euphoria of my own mental growth spurts and moments of discovery like what he describes here:

For a few years, I was learning faster than at… See more →

I’m known to enjoy a film made by clumsy amateurs reaching for something beyond their means, and this unfathomably earnest love letter to the beach towns of Delaware is definitely that. But even if its many perplexing choices provoke the occasional chuckle, its failed attempts to mine drama from Holocaust survivors, homophobia, and sexual assault make it cringeworthy in all the wrong ways. To make matters worse, it has a character named Gallagher who doesn’t… See more →

I’m not big on movies loudly foregrounding firearms these days, so I thought it might not be the best time to finally watch Hard Boiled, but I did it anyway, and even though it may be the single most trigger-happy movie I’ve ever seen, its effect is entirely different than what I’ve come to expect from most movies fitting that description. I read a review that derides Hard Boiled as less symphony than juvenile heavy… See more →

It might seem surprising that Brad Dourif’s intense and fascinating performance in Wise Blood didn’t get him much higher visibility in Hollywood, but it’s hard to imagine a more singularly challenging character for audiences than Flannery O’Connor’s anti-preacher, Hazel Motes, whose all-consuming contempt Dourif projects forcefully and without apology. If this film underwent test screenings, it seems to have refused to be influenced by them, with the possible exception of its ill-fitting, whimsical score, something… See more →

Based on Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 novel of the same name, The Big Clock was released in 1948, and Hollywood took a second swing at it with No Way Out in 1987. As I write this in 2026, another 39 years have passed and we’re due for a third iteration, which has me thinking. I was 11 when No Way Out came out, and though I hadn’t seen it before now, and it’s dated in many… See more →

A surrealist nightmare of expressionist lighting and skewed compositions made from colossal pre- and postwar European architecture, oppressive even when it’s beautiful, its sharp angles stuffed to the gills with detritus, evoking a civilization abandoned in a panic. Even the scenes with hundreds of extras feel lonely. It talks too much but my god does it look incredible.

See the full gallery (14 items) →

Analogical Force, an electronic music label based in Madrid, found its way onto my radar earlier this year when I picked up Oh Mr. James’s fun I’m Not Here EP. Most of the label’s output honestly doesn’t do much for me, but its design is another story, which for the last several years has largely been handled by the UK-based Geometric Love, a.k.a. Steve Hyland. I especially enjoy Hyland’s fearless lettering, which is almost entirely… See more →