Author: The Spectators Odyssey

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

**Major Spoilers Ahead***

It’s been a long 3 years since its initial announcement but Matt Reeves The Batman starring Robert Pattinson is finally here. exhale.

It’s hard to believe this is actually the first standalone live action Batman movie since Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Rises, 10 years ago!

But the last time we got this character on the big screen was in a controversial little film called Justice League back in 2017! In the midst of whatever DC was trying to accomplish with their own cinematic universe, its version of the Justice League and their beefcake of a Batman played by Ben Affleck (Actually not a terrible portrayal in my opinion) who has obviously since left his role, many thought the announcement of a completely different Batman movie, set in its own standalone universe when the DCEU hadn’t even ceased to exist yet was excessively strange yet most, including myself, were curious to see what would come of it. What led us to this new interpretation of Batman is a long and confusing stretch of behind the scenes back and forth, which we might never hear the full story.

Even if The Batman had just looked awful in its lead up, like some confusingly cruel mistake (which it never really did), people were going to show up to see The Batman regardless and they sure did. Luckily The Batman is utterly badass because it’s a movie that won’t be going away any time soon.

What is there not to love about this movie? There is almost too much to even say about this smash hit, it’s overwhelming to cover every inch. But I’ll try my best to cover some of my favorite aspects.

The list of directors tasked with bringing Batman to life on screen in standalone films is short. Martinson, Burton, Schumacher, Nolan and now Reeves.

Director, Writer, Producer Matt Reeves knew his assignment, saw what already exists for Batman on the big screen yet knew him and his team had something special and fresh here. That’s calling your shot. His and Peter Craigs writing laid the groundwork and together, Matt Reeves’ vision and direction and DP Greig Frasers visual prowess brought this latest interpretation of Batman to sensational life.

It’s a dark and gritty asskicking vigilante detective thriller, even darker than any of the Nolan-Bale titles but with trails of clever humor that slips through the cracks of its concrete corruption. 

Some of the coolest displays of superhero action takes place in this brilliantly choreographed movie as if it is the definitive Batman Ballad (of course it isnt). But it’s clear already that it holds some substantial weight in not just the characters’ existence on film but the genre as a whole. Every single fight, chase, and mysterious twist and dramatic turn is executed with a laser focus attention for every bit of detail.

In a film with plenty of memorable displays of adrenaline pumping combat, the shining moment of action has to be the glorious chase sequence where Batman loses all control and recklessly chases the Penguin through Gothams backstreets and a congested highway during a dark rainstorm. It’s a loud and proud stretch of the movie and I could watch it on repeat for a very long time. Who doesn’t love spectacular displays of vehicular mayhem. 

I dig the choice of vehicles they went with for this interpretation of Batman. The Batrod is a ferocious hotrod with more than enough horsepower and is able to inflict a fair amount of sustainable damage to those who oppose it and the Batbike, a speedy little motorbike perfect for stealthily zipping through the crowded Gotham city streets when needed. It’s on these commutes through the city that we often get a look at this world the team behind The Batman envisioned and has now brought to life.

This version of Gotham City feels like the closest to reality, but the danger it possesses is tenfold. Everyone sucks and everything sucks. It feels like a near future version of Nolan’s Gotham and even Todd Phillips most recent Joker film.

It’s a neglected and corrupt city encompassed by a dense Noir veil and Matt Giachinos powerful score washes over everything. It’s a score that has been on repeat since the night I saw it. 

The city instantly swallows you up in it. It’s one that might make you want to play the Arkham video game titles again, exploring every inch of it. But it’s all too easy to become an innocent target in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But lurking in the shadows of the darkest corners in Gotham is our latest caped bat vigilante choosing his own deserving target very carefully or so he thinks.

The list of actors who have played the live action role of Gotham City’s man dressed like a bat is also short. There has been West, Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney, Bale, (Can’t truly count Affleck) now Pattinson.

Robert Pattinson steps into one of the toughest characters to portray on the big screen. In hindsight he fits in perfectly with the rest of the Batman alumni in looks yet this is a version of him we haven’t really seen before. His opening monologue acts as our informal introduction. 

“Thursday, October 31st. The city streets are crowded for the holiday. Even with the rain. Hidden in the chaos is the element, waiting to strike like snakes. And I’m there too. Watching. 2 years of nights have turned me into a nocturnal animal. I must choose my targets carefully. It’s a big city. I can’t be everywhere. But they don’t know where I am. We have a signal now, for when I’m needed. When that light hits the sky, it’s not just a call- it’s a warning. To them. Fear is a tool. They think I’m hiding in the shadows. But I AM the shadows. I wish I could say I’m making a difference, but I’m not. Murder, robberies, assault- 2 years later, they’re all up. And now this. This city’s eating itself. Maybe it can’t be saved, but I have to try.”

Talk about a precise intro that’ll give you goosebumps.

Any speculation that he would fail in the role can finally be laid to rest 6 feet under the dark surface of Gotham City. People have compared Pattinsons version to the typical Emo, with his somber attitude, a skinny build, black on black everything, the black eye shadow, his dark and dreary demeanor but he is more so a goth than anything else. He certainly puts the Goth in Gotham City. It’s an aesthetic that surrounds him like some dark cloud. He lives in a tower apartment decked out in some wicked looking gothic architecture, he tinkers away in his underground detective batcave and has no real family to call his own.

By day, he’s a fresh faced city playboy yet he’s clearly a reclusive, broken and tormented Bruce Wayne who doesn’t make many public appearances. And by night he’s a nocturnal vigilante hellbent on ridding the city of its lowest of crimes by night, oh and some detective work on the side. He’s still fairly new to that facet of his character and it’s clear. 

He isn’t some beefcake Bat, he’s just a lean mean asskicking machine. His suit is exactly like it should be, nothing flashy or bulky, it’s just sleek bullet proof armor that looks great and gets the job done. That wing suit is pretty hilarious though.

Batman has only been fighting petty crime in this corrupt city for 2 years. All who know his name, fear his existence, just as they should. But we find the character in some sort of moral and existential sophomore slump.

It’s in this period of time that Batman faces his real first test in The Riddler. Played by Paul Dano, an actor who can step into more comedic roles with ease, this was yet another odd casting choice that many immediately started to picture as a modern version of what Jim Carrey did with the character but boy were those assumptions dead wrong. We’ve even seen glimpses of what Dano is capable of on screen as some rather dark, twisted or misunderstood characters but the version of The Riddler he was responsible for portraying is easily his most terrifying role yet. He’s still all riddle me this riddle me that but in the most disturbingly grounded way. 

In reality, this villain is a caucasian orphan turned mentally unwell incel who was long forgotten and neglected by the Gotham City system that was once led by political powerhouse Thomas Wayne. He grows up to be this suffocatingly masked terrorist straight out of the most terrifying horror thrillers. With disturbing riddles that accompany deadly traps, his character is much like that of the Zodiac Killer, Saw’s John Kramer or Se7ens John Doe. 

What appears to only be The Batman’s first test as Gotham’s only known vigilante slowly derails as more of a Bruce Wayne wake up call and it’s great. It takes a bit for him to realize it but The Riddler is on a personal mission to expose how tainted Bruce’s privileged upbringing actually was, while the person underneath this evil persona was left to rot away in false promises and city wide corruption, again a system that was led by Bruce’s father. These two men have more in common than Bruce would care to admit. Batman slowly devolves into an animal hellbent on serving cold hard asskicking justice at any cost as if he could drown out the truth.

I’m a big fan of how it covers the history of Bruce and the Wayne-Arkham family backstory. Instead of some brief and tired flashback, it instead incorporates the lies, cover ups and the tragedies that come from it all into the story as an overarching theme that The Riddler can use as a weapon he knows all too well. You could flip a coin and one side be the Wayne bloodline and the other side Arkham and either side it lands on doesn’t bode well for the legacy that Bruce has to live with. It’s the perfect fuel to keep the mystery burning to the very end. I’m excited to see how this plays into the evolution of the character in the sequels.

The Riddlers Wayne mind games were only one piece of this catastrophic puzzle though. His master plan is much much more. While he digs deep into Bruce Waynes flawed roots, its enough to distract The Batman from the van bombs he’s planted all around the city and he’s not alone in his mission. With him are his cult of online goons who feel the same way he does. Sounds eerily familiar.

And so after getting voluntarily arrested, The Riddler is safely tucked away in an Arkham prison, and he conveniently has a window view to watch his work successfully go up in all of its explosive glory. The city begins to literally flood and his army of internet incels then storm the Gotham arena where thousands of its population are trapped by the incoming water, and with it a nightmarish wave of domestic terrorism.

While it’s nothing inventive for this IPs cinematic history, it does a fine job exhibiting a deadly threat on a grand scale, solidifying the severity of its villain but also providing Batman with his biggest rescue operation yet. One by one he fights the riddler knockoffs and then leads the innocent through the darkness and flooding to safety. This entire act of the movie comes relatively close to previous Batman events like the hospital explosion in The Dark Knight, or the stadium destruction in The Dark Knight Rises just to name two of The IPs more infamous moments.

There are once again plenty of other familiar Batman faces living in this Gotham City. Among the somewhat trustworthy ally’s is Alfred who is now played by Andy Serkis. His presence is rather minimal in this movie and he should be back in the following sequels.

Zoe Kravitz plays Selina Kyle aka Catwoman, a traumatized young woman who has her eyes set on taking down her mobster biological father at all costs and getting some long deserved compensation to once and for all flee this damaged place once and for all.

I was hoping there wouldn’t be any of the romance between Bruce and Selina and it seemed like that would be the case at first but they just couldn’t resist squeezing that sexual tension into the story. Naive of me to think. But overall, Kravitz plays an enigmatic Catwoman nicely.

Then there is of course Lt. James Gordon played by Jeffrey Wright. Batman’s investigative partner and the first to truly rely on his help to rid Gotham City of its persistent criminal activity. While he sometimes feels left with nothing vital to do, he consistently represents what little authoritative virtue is left on this hellhole island. 

Crime is the backbone of Gotham city though and without it there would be no Batman. While The Riddler is more of the chaotic evil in the city, the mob of Gotham serves as the Lawfully evil threat. This infectious body of criminals has firm control of Gotham and that’s nothing new. Led by Mobster Carmine Falcone, played by the great John Turturro, he owns a hefty number of gothams law enforcement, from lowly cops to higher DA figures and the city at large is essentially kept in check by fear and the highly addictive eye drop drug. The history between Falcone and Bruce is interestingly revealed to us thanks to of all people, The Riddler who takes it upon himself to rope the worst of these scumbags into his own little sick plan.

Never too far from Falcones side is Oz/The Penguin played by Colin Farrell or so were told. His makeup completely transforms the actor into this wise cracking, underground club owning, right hand mob-man. Great interpretation of this character and he fits into this version of Gotham perfectly. He should be back for even more screen time in the sequels.

Aside from some comparable thematic Batman Begins retreading, the weakest part of this movie for me is its indirect introduction of The Joker in the Arkham prison, befriending The Riddler. Barry Keohghan plays this figure simply credited as “Unseen Arkham Prisoner”.  We can safely assume this will be the titular character, but whether he goes on to headline one of the next entries in Reeves Batman installations is yet to be confirmed though. It didn’t immediately hit me like oh this is going to be even better than this one! It’s mostly a combination of this movie setting such a high bar for itself and the late Heath Ledger perfectly portraying the character in the Nolan trilogy. So this doesn’t immediately feel like the next best move but if it is, Matt Reeves is apparently the man to prove us wrong. We will all be eagerly asking ourselves what’s next and how to do you top this,

Other than that, The Batman should easily land somewhere towards the top 5 of the growing list of live action stand alone features. It’s definitely one of DCs finer movies and it’s one of the genre’s best titles to date.

I don’t want to sound like I’m overreacting but if a film like Joker can find its way into Best Picture and Best Actor conversations, The Batman and its teams should have no problems doing the same. There is still a lot of time left in 2022 but it’s impossible to envision next year’s award season without numerous nominations for The Batman in probably every single category, it’s that strong of a motion picture.

But the absolute best thing about The Batman? It’s a Halloween movie!!!!! Well it takes place during this fun time of the year anyways. Close enough!

You will want to see this movie on the biggest screens because it’s a spectacle to behold. From its bold direction, the stunning cinematography, the powerful score to the phenomenal performances. The hype is no hyperbole. The Batman is an enthralling 3 hours of pure cinematic captivation from start to finish.

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

“It’s him isn’t it. Laytherfayce”

***Spoilers Ahead***

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is hilariously bad-ass. It’s poorly written, badly acted, lacks any narrative coherence and it had me freaking out the entire time figuring out what in god’s name was actually going on. It does more to explain the original film in the first 5 minutes than it’s able to do for its own movie during its entire runtime. But it’s not all terrible.

Basically a group of gen z “gentri-fuckers” -played by Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Jacob Latimore and Nell Hudson- have rolled into the abandoned town of Harlow Texas and plan on selling their newly acquired property to a bus full of tourists who seem to have no idea how close this place is to the site of the original film, or maybe they do, its just never clearly revealed as is the case for nearly everything else that follows. Things just happen and you either roll with it all or find yourself throwing up your hands in utter confusion and a fit of frustration. 

It’s their pestering presence that triggers the long dormant monster, Leatherface. If you erase any other sequel and only welcome the idea that this mentally ill and underdeveloped man went into hiding not long after the traumatic murder spree of the original film and found solace in the Harlow orphanage where his surrogate mother has taken care of him for nearly 50 years and as a result felt no need to kill all this time (even if the potential was always deep within him and its clear now that it was), you could maybe squeeze out a mere drop of logic. But logic is quickly chainsawed into a big messy pile of nonsense.

So all it takes to awaken that murderous chainsaw wielding beast is yet another domestic intrusion. How the movie gets us back to this point makes terrible sense really but it’s what gets Texas Chainsaw Massacre back to where it truly belongs as the most primal version of a slasher film and that itself is literally the only thing that makes sense about the movie. And so the plot finally thickens when blood begins to spill.

Afterall, no one really cares who Leatherface is until he puts on that skin mask.

It’s apparent that people are getting caught up in the underlying themes just tossed into the story. Stuff like the general idea of Gen Z culture, gentrification, school mass shootings, the death of a small town, racism and that domestic dysfunctionality. I can see how people feel the movie inadequately attempts to work these themes into the movie or thinks its far too woke for its own good, especially in a film that doesn’t need any of it to just needlessly clash and so incompetently. But none of it ever stood a chance against a horror icon like Leatherface.

There are two things I clearly like about the movie, with another slowly growing on me. The first is Leatherface himself and it’s something that I only now think I like. The second is the nonsensical slasher slashing and the third is the film’s surprisingly great cinematography.

This version of Leatherface, played by Mark Burnham, continues to grow on me. At first I was indifferent to this new actor and his portrayal of an older Hardesty boy. He’s an aged man that has maintained a beefy build, standing at 6 foot 4 when he’s not hunching over from his old age. Once he puts on his surrogate mothers skinned face, gets a few murders into of his system and a whole lot of blood smeared on him, that big body comes in handy and makes him just as terrifying as he was all the way back in 1974. But there’s an aged maturity to his body language now, it’s more reserved and less flaily but not necessarily sluggish. We essentially witness this killer be brought back to life so to speak because by the end he does his little infamous dance like he’s back! He definitely fits in with Blumhouses current version of an older Michael Myers. It’s just a shame we don’t get a full Hardesty family unit in some capacity because The Saw is Family!

The quality of Leatherface kills varies greatly. He mindlessly massacres everyone with ease except for the two sisters of the main group, Melody (Yarkin) and Lilia (Fisher). He even destroys an old friend with such a disrespectful amount of ease. I won’t be discussing this unnecessary and pointless return because it’s frustrating the more I think about it.

There are far too many tame methods of killing early on but then it’ll hit you out of nowhere with the most brutal instances of violence the genre has seen to date, relentlessly bashing the local redneck “realtor” in the head with a sledgehammer until there’s really nothing left of it, snapping a deputy’s arm open with ease and then shoving the jagged bone into his neck, cleaving a gnarly chunk out of Dante’s face. Then there are the crown horror jewels of the film. There is the soon to be infamous neon bus massacre (all cancel culture wokeisms aside), It’s a wild terrifying and honestly claustrophobic stretch of horror and then the killer somewhat revisionist ending that made me cheer and holler wildly for no good reason. I would love to dive deeper into these two sequences in greater detail later on. But these two sequences are where the franchise thrives and it certainly does in this movie.

Thanks to a pair of cinematographers, now director David Blue Garcia and his DP Ricardo Diaz, visually, Texas Chainsaw Massacre looks exactly like it should and it creates such a classic horror milieu that feels true to this franchise. You can see it and you can certainly feel it. Filmed in Bulgaria, you feel as though you’re in the scorching summer of rural Texas. Even with the hot mess that unfolds on screen, the movie looks great. It doesn’t just look great but the setting somehow works. Despite how confusing it is at first, this little Bulgarian set turned abandoned small town makes for an effective Texas Chainsaw Massacre locale. It’s a gruesome playground for Leatherface to have some fun and even find himself again!

But who is David Blue Garcia? After a duo of directors left the project just a week or so into its production, David Blue Garcia, a small time cinematographer-director with few projects attached to his name and not a single major IP such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was hired on to direct. It’s still unclear how this filmmaker even got his hands on this movie to begin with. That’s something that needs to be researched but I would suspect this filmmaker was on Fede Alvarez’s radar or in close proximity to his inner circle.

Speaking of, this could go down as Fede Alvarez’s first miss, at least as a producer and if you compare it to his previous work in the industry. I remember the news that he was attached to this film as a producer got us all excited for something good. Evil Dead (2013) was a solid theatrical horror release and the original Don’t Breathe (2016) was great so things seemed promising for his career. I do wonder what this film may have been like had Alvarez directed it and not merely served as a producer.

The directors behind Leatherface 2017, still the worst installment of the franchise, went on to direct The Deep House a lowkey great new horror movie so there is hope that David Blue Garcia can bounce back even better if his dedication to the horror genre is legit. Glimpses of it can be found in this movie.

It’s not often that Netflix welcomes in horror films as historically violent as this franchise but here we are. While it would be cool to see this movie get its own theatrical release, like Halloween 2018 and Scream 2022 did, the fact that it even exists at all is fascinating. It would thrive much better on Shudder’s streaming platform because they would authentically advocate for the film, good or bad. You just know that this movie will be quickly forgotten by Netflix, on Netflix.

Everything has been said already. Texas Chainsaw Massacre has far too many awful qualities. That’s just a constant with the franchise as a whole. But I still had so much fun with this sequel, requel or whatever it is…..interacting with the absurdity, yelling about frustrations and mostly laughing at it but occasionally with it too. It makes for some fun and entertaining group riffing!

Just like Leatherface himself, who is triggered out of hiding and swiftly makes his murderous rounds only to retreat back into his bizarre and fucked up sanctum, Texas Chainsaw Massacre poked that big bear, woke up something horrific, awful and downright confusing and now we must all endure its brief lifespan until it quickly sinks back into the dark depths of the Netflix library.

While it’s not THE Texas Chainsaw Massacre it certainly is one and I quite like that.

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

The big hitter of Valentines Day-Week 2022 has arrived.

Apparently adapted from a Graphic Novel by Bobby Crosby, Kat Coiro’s film version of Marry Me is a fun star studded rom-com, full of love, songs and love songs (all of which are infectious), an acceptable amount of cheesiness, it’s well made and different from anything that’s come before it. 

Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson go all in together and produce some lovely chemistry on screen. In their mid 50s both of these stars have aged nicely and it makes for a real flawless portrayal of mid-life love, a time often for second chances with it. J-Lo once again reminds us just how multi-talented she is with her voice, her acting and her raw charisma and Wilson continues to hone in his everyday man’s down to earth persona. Sadly no iconic “Wow’s” were uttered in this movie.

It leaves very little room for error. That’s for sure. I mean, it’s so strange that MATH is heavily featured in a ROM-COM. Sure it’s simply a great way to contrast Charlie (Owen Wilson) a reserved Math teacher from the luxurious open book celebrity lifestyle of singer-songwriter-entertainer Kat (Jennifer Lopez) but clearly someone came up with a formula to solve for the perfect version of a Romantic Comedy.

Personally, Marry Me is too Starry Eyed to my taste. I feel no true connection to the movie but I totally get it’s appeal. I know it’s just me because I’m not the type of person who gushes over celebrities and especially not their love lives, both which make up the movie. I’ll still be there in the crowd, having fun, enjoying what I’m watching and noticing that others around me are too but I’ll never be as obsessively invested as some. I’m not what you’d call a “Stan”. But the movie is undeniably sweet.

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

Two Rom-Coms hit the streaming world in what could be considered their Super Bowl of release windows: Valentines Day Week. While both offer sweet and hilarious stories of love, they couldn’t feel more different. 

The smaller of the two is Jason Orely’s I Want You Back and it’s a sincere little Rom-Com lead by an absolutely adorable Jenny Slate and Charlie Day duo. 

The plot is fairly original. Emma (Slate) and Peter (Day) get dumped. It’s after the two randomly meet during a stairwell crying sesh that they realize they have a lot in common and want the same thing. So the two decide that with each other’s help they can surely win back their exes, who they firmly believe are their soulmates. It’s a cute chance encounter and it becomes the start of a wholesome friendship but of course with the potential for so much more. With how much these two have in common and how easily and quickly they hit it off, you can see where this is going. But how it gets there makes for an incredibly authentic and original love story. 

My only real complaint is in its portrayal of its main characters. I do think it leans heavier into Charlie Day’s character in stereotypical fashion, he’s a rather successful VP at his company, He was with his significant other for 6 years, he’s great with kids, genuinely kind hearted and of course ends up with the girl. While it’s always made clear that Emma is essentially the opposite. She works a 9-5 as an orthodontist’s receptionist, She was only with her significant other for just over a year, she’s an all around mess who still hasn’t really figured things out so she’s forced to share her apartment with a college couple and so she comes off much weaker than her male friend. I only bring this all up because it feels, well, too stereotypical of a rom-com in a movie that feels fresher and more authentic than most.

I Want You Back doesn’t carry the theatrical star studded weight that Marry Me, Valentines Day 2022s other new Rom-Com does, but this movie is also well worth potentially adding into your Valentine’s Day plans and future Rom-Com marathons!

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

“Hey Kimi. Play Sabotage.”

Each year or so it feels like a new Steven Soderbergh movie comes out of nowhere and it’s always a pleasant surprise. With minimal marketing in place, tailored for at home streaming, it sure feels like his movies come out of nowhere.

With his latest Tech Thriller Kimi, Steven Soderbergh continues to show off his technical ingenuity behind the camera with some low-cost yet highly rewarding movie magic. It’s about what you’d expect from his adapted style of filmmaking and it makes for an interestingly intense watch. Kimi is shades of similar films of the past like Rear Window, Blow Out, Blow Up and The Conversation just to name a few off the top of my head and Soderbergh’s spin on it is a fantastic blend of homage with some modern originality.

Since Unsane, Soderbergh has continued to bring the world his style of filmmaking right at home. He found a way to get his movie seen regardless of the changing theatrical landscape due to technical changes or far more difficult circumstances like a global pandemic and has continued to find success in it. It’s strange to think that he adapted to this style of filmmaking a few years before the world truly changed because of the pandemic and in these most uncertain times there is one thing for certain and that’s the fact that Steven Soderbergh has basically mastered the streaming release at this point. He sort of had a head start on filmmakers that only recently have sought to still make art during these strenuous times.

The film takes place primarily in one spacious yet confining apartment and in it, we get personal with Zoe Kravitz in a world not too far off from our own. Covid, mask wearing, remotely working from home, having some severe socially crippling anxiety disorders, and especially the darker side of the tech world. Kimi keeps things painfully real.

While the film doesn’t hold the political or social weight that many tech conspiracy thrillers before it held, that doesn’t mean Zoe Kravitz took her role lightly. She goes all in as a complex leading character and she pulls off yet another superb performance as Angela Childs, a millenial blue haired agoraphobic tech analyst turned hitmen ass-kicking badass.

Kimi is an effectively startling tech conspiracy thriller conveniently available for you to watch right now on HBOmax.

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

“Is he a man or beast”…..or is he geek?

Nightmare Alley is holy mesmerizing shit!!! Its addictive, deceptive neo-noir for its entire 2 hour 30 minute runtime and it left me wanting MORE. An hour long Carny tale that ventures into the big city. And it cynically engulfs you with its hypnotic 1940s milieu. It’s a classic rise and fall thriller drenched in heavy repressed themes of drug and alcohol addiction that plagued the US during that time period. This sort of thriller is one of my filmic languages. I got flashbacks of A Face in the Crowd.

Del Toro acting alumni are back and fill the screen with filthy hardened life. Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, and of course Stanton Carlisle himself, Bradley Cooper.

Bradley Cooper pulls off the finest performance of his unfinished career as Stanton Carlisle, a mysterious drifter turned curious carny turned mentalist con-man turned forgotten geek. This character is far too reserved at first but it becomes clear exactly how attentively deceptive this man really is. Even though it was shown to us right from the beginning. When Cooper’s character opens up, his performance shines brightest.

The direction and cinematography may at times feel a bit too flashy or modern to pull off a neo-noir as great as this one but Guillermo del Toro and DOP Dan Laustsen pull it off once again. I’m feeling this tricky little hypnotic neo-noir thriller might end up as one of my favorite del Toro films.

I only have 2 regrets. First is not seeing the film in theaters back in December during a surprisingly stacked month or theatrical releases. It is most definitely worthy of the big screen! And second is having not seen the 1947 version before. I’m sure it’s right up my alley as well. I imagine the novel is worth a read!

I’d like to read that little book of mentalism and pull some tricks on the Academy voters because it should be in plenty of nomination conversations. 

How could this movie NOT be up for any Oscars come March?!

Update as of 2/8/22

Nightmare Alley has received 4 Oscar nominations for the 94th Annual Academy Awards. Best Picture, Cinematograhy, Production Design and Costume Design. All extremely worthy nominations. But none for acting recognition unfortunately, leaving one of Bradley Cooper’s greatest performances high and dry. 2021 was a very stacked year for great leading actor performances.

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

For what’s it’s worth:

***Spoilers Ahead***

Roland Emmerich’s latest blockbuster Moonfall is an astronomical science fiction disaster on so many levels.

First and foremost, it’s one giant mess but you should have already come to expect that from the director given his previous work.

The film opens with a neat space vista that oddly enough reminded me of the infamous earth shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey, only visually speaking and nothing more. Instead of capitalizing on a fairly neat opening shot, what follows is a flimsy setup that rushes in then drags on for far too long.

A NASA crew is conducting some repairs outside the space station when some sort of metallic swarm/snake attacks and as quickly as it came, it slithers its way to the moon where it digs itself into the object before we jump 10 years into the future and are formally introduced to the characters. From the attacked crew is now disgraced Astronaut Brian Harper—played by Patrick Wilson—and distinguished astronaut Jocinda Fowler—played by Halle Berry. Then there’s John Bradley’s KC, a conspiracy loner who provides the film’s comedic relief. Together they make up humanity’s savior trio.

They’re awfully written and terribly spoken yet somehow they still end up being likable characters. This seems to be a result of true star power that actors like Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry possess and even John Bradley who shows great promise with his humor, even if it’s at times far too cheesy. I always enjoy seeing these stars on the big screen.

The three discover that something has thrown the moon out of its Earthly orbit and it causes natural disasters to occur. Flooding, earthquakes and mass hysteria and strangely it all only really takes place in the US. The films is deeply American rooted now looking back at it all in retrospect. The stretches of natural catastrophe are fairly bland compared to previous Emmerich disaster epics but work well enough given how real and how terrifying a concept like this actually seems. Thanks to a whole lot of scientific concepts that the film clearly BS’s its way through, the Moon continues to fall towards earth with alarming acceleration and the closer it gets the crazier the natural disasters get.

It has your necessary B plot to accompany the main attraction and its fine. Brian’s disgruntled son Sonny—played by Charlie Plummer—is tasked with helping his and Jo’s family to safety in Aspen Colorado where the elite have their bunker. I dig the snowy Rocky Mountain landscape this whole plot takes place in. Their escape to safety is a thrilling one that fills in the evils of human desperation but it’s all incredibly far-fetched. The natural disasters that plague those on Earth are escalating by the hour and provide some awesome disaster visuals. Falling pieces of the moon smash into the mountains and snowstorms sweep through with each pass of the moon. 

But the natural disasters caused by the moon and this mysterious extraterrestrial monster that has seemingly buried itself into the moon only scratch the surface of the science fiction here. Things really picks up in the second half with an insane 3rd act that went in some directions I haven’t seen from Emmerich in a long time if ever. He more than ever urges the viewer to suspend their disbelief because it gets bonkers.

While Earth is getting completely annihilated by the moon’s gravitational effects, in an incredibly unbelievable fashion, our trio of hero’s blast off to the moon in a retired space shuttle to save the day and blow up this monstrous threat. They descend into our moon and discover something otherworldly.

The Moon is the true “star” of the film. We’ve always known the Moon to be a natural satellite for Earth but in Moonfall it’s instead an actual Megastructure built around a white dwarf star by an ancient yet lightyears more advanced human civilization—our “Forefathers”. 

I really dig the whole ancient human backstory despite how entirely outlandish it is. There were countless moments that I found myself wincing in disbelief, shaking my head at cheesy humor and throwing my hands up at the most confusing events. This stretch of the film made me do all of the above yet it’s a surprisingly incredible display of science fiction and not at all what I was expecting in its big reveal. I couldn’t help but feel amazed.

The swarm-snake creature is actually an evil out of control manifestation of AI created by the ancient yet superior ancestors of humanity on their home planet. Its sound design actually rules, its probably my second favorite thing about the film. The Moon structure acted as some sort of Noah’s Ark spaceship to flee the deadly threat and find a new home billions of light years away, and our moon happened to be the sole survivor and it happened to find Earth. Within this megastructure, the ancient civilization has found a way to keep the structure operating with even more unexplainable science fiction, and their own AI consciousness that possibly continues to power and protect the moon. The AI monster has finally tracked down this last remaining vessel to harness and devour its powerful energy, causing it’s orbit to weaken. So with this new found information, the trio is able to make necessary sacrifices and blow the technological evil to tiny metallic bits and save earth, or at least who is left on earth because I can’t even imagine how many people died while our space saviors were up in space. The moon’s orbit accelerated to the point of days probably lasting an hour causing wave after wave of disaster and it even ended up making contact with our planet before it returned to a safely distanced orbit where its once rocky moon surface has shed off exposing its true technological exterior.

Despite how awesome I find the final act to be, It just never feels like the movie is not adequately equipped to harness its ambitious twist and that’s a shame because I found it to be my favorite part of this disastrous science fiction mess.

There does appear to be remnants of a message hidden beneath the science fiction nonsense and within the awful exposition that riddles the entire film. It’s clearly a layered warning that the state of our modern civilization somewhat mirrors that of our fictional ancestors and we may be heading in the same endangered direction. Themes of looming natural disasters, futuristic AI tech and it’s advancements yet potential harmfulness, deceptive politics, and notions of what a world united could look like become apparent by the end and it feels like humanity was given a second chance to change course for the better.

When thinking about all of this, it oddly feels like Moonfall may also be Roland Emmerich self reflecting on his own career. His successful past, an unsure present in an ever changing industry and what his future as a filmmaker may hold. It’s something I would love to explore in another piece of deeper writing later on.

Moonfall truly feels like Roland Emmerichs greatest (and worst) hits. I’m not even kidding when I say you could take every tagline from his previous films and it would end up creating this undeniably disastrous yet still somehow entertaining sci-fi blockbuster.

If you come into the movie aware of Roland Emmerich’s work and with light expectations you may find yourself having a surprisingly fun time!

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

The Fallout reaches deep into the acute trauma caused by school mass shootings and the extensive road to recovery that accompanies this horrifying experience.

Megan Park is a familiar face in the acting world and has dabbled with directing work for a few years now. The Fallout marks her first ever directorial debut and she couldn’t have written and directed a more heartbreaking story.

The film follows high school student Vada–played by Jenna Ortega–as she navigates an ordinary day of school. Being late with your best friend, classroom boredom but after rushing to the bathroom for a false alarm emergency call from her little sister she makes small talk with a fellow student, Mia Reed–played by Maddie Zeigler–a popular student who is applying her makeup for class photos. Their bathroom small talk is abruptly cut short by the piercing blasts of gunfire in the hallways. It’s a sound that children of the millennial and gen z generation can recognize in milliseconds and so the two girls seek safety in one of the stalls. Gunfire continues as another fellow student Quintin–played by Niles Fitch–seeks cover in the same stall as the girls. Vada has a severe panic attack, a shivering and bloodied Quintin holds himself in the corner and Mia vomits into the toilet. Sirens replace the gunshots and silence fills the bathroom. 

This event connects these three characters in ways they could never have imagined before today and not long after the events, intimate friendships are formed.

While the focus of The Fallout is solely on Jenna Ortega’s Vada, the film does a great job extending the scope to a handful of other students and how they cope with the experience together and how they process the tragedy in their own ways.

We see how devastating the sadness of actually losing a loved one while also being in the crosshairs of gun violence is for a young man like Quintin and it causes him to have severe issues showing or receiving affection. We see the crippling fear that overcomes Mia, a once vibrant young woman, who has to face this nightmare all alone while her parents are abroad. Vada’s best friend, Nick Feinstein–played by Will Ropp–responds to the trauma by fighting back against gun violence and the institutions that have completely failed kids. While Vada finds herself running from her own trauma. When it catches up to her she exerts some survivors guilt, she shuts out her own family and her own best friend and she self medicates with love and drugs alongside the two students that share this traumatic connection. Jenna Ortega, Maddie Zeigler, Niles Fitch and Will Ropp just absolutely pour their hearts out for their performance in The Fallout and it elevates the story with valuable authenticity.

The nature of trauma is entirely unpredictable and oftentimes indescribably overwhelming. It’s easier for some to move on while others become trapped in it for much longer with varying severity. The Fallout accompanies this subject matter with such a sympathetic awareness. The one shining hope is the resiliency kids show despite persistent adult failure that surrounds them every single day. It’s especially the case when it comes to the denial that there is no problem with gun violence so no solution is needed. This country has failed its kids so terribly and continues to do so over and over. Vada finds herself in a slightly better place by the end of the film but it takes very little to remember it all. She receives a notification on her phone of another shooting in Ohio where 12 more kids have been killed. And so the film can only conclude with the harshest realization that this is an enduring American threat that plagues our own youth and will continue to until things change. 

Be aware that while this is absolutely a movie you need to see, it does contain scenes of traumatizing events that may be disturbing for some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.

You can watch The Fallout on Hulu.

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

Flee is an incredibly touching movie. It’s got some of the most inventive animation documentary filmmaking with heartbreaking, crushingly real storytelling.

The style of animation is quite unique and unlike anything I’ve seen before, not necessarily groundbreaking but it perfectly fits the story being told. It’s an interesting way to incorporate some privacy into such intimate live audio interviews.

Flee is directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen but the story is told for the first time ever by Amin Nawabi, who opens up about his traumatic past of continuous fleeing, hiding and lying after being forced to leave his home country behind. At an already confusing and overwhelming age, Amin was completely robbed of a typical life and it’s affected him to this very day. When he was only a teenager, he and his family were forced to flee a war torn Afghanistan for a new life in Denmark. It’s clear more than ever that this isn’t merely a safe and easy relocation from point A to point B, as is often the case for many people seeking refuge. Flee’s focus is on how far too complex, unnecessarily drawn out and traumatically grueling asylum seeking can often be when faced with an unjust life or death scenario.

Amin’s older mother, one older brother and two older sisters first seek safety in Russia, only to find it overrun by corrupt authorities, who confine them to a tiny apartment, fearing for their lives on a daily basis waiting for the oldest brother to afford expensive trafficking to reunite in Denmark. But they are still tasked with getting themselves to a new home.

When given the opportunity to flee Russia, their overpaid journeys prove to be equally as life threatening as if they stayed in Afghanistan.

Amin and his family overpay for numerous failed trafficking attempts and they are slowly split up with each one. His sisters nearly die in shipping containers, Amin his mother and brother almost freeze on a long snowy hike and almost drown on a broken down overcrowded flooding boat in the middle the Baltic Sea before being gawked at by tourists on the ship that “rescues” those that are stranded, and Amin flies all alone to the wrong but possibly safer country with nothing but a new friends gold necklace and his fake passport. These make up the bulk of this family’s physical experiences but it just can’t account for the amount of lifelong trauma caused by seeking asylum in a broken terrible world.

Not only did Amin have to hide from the world as a refugee from Afghanistan but he was also forced to lie about his family’s existence on top of not being able to be who he really was as a young gay man. 

Flee is a gut wrenching recollection of losing everything you know and love, becoming homeless in all senses of the word, hiding because of the circumstances and as a result dealing with the trauma caused by it to this very day.

This is clear when we see present day Amin, now 36, a successful academic, happily engaged to his fiancé Kasper, they have a cute little cat and are currently looking for their new home, a concept that is still foreign to him. Amin was lucky enough to eventually be reunited with his family years later. But he still bears the burden of his past experiences and his rightfully apprehensive demeanor can be heard just by the sound of his soft yet hardened voice.

While Flee only tells Amin’s story, the poster is filled with people from all over the world. Most definitely pointing out the fact that this is a universal experience that has been forced upon so many others before and continues to happen today, tomorrow, the next day and every single day after that. Here in the US, we aren’t exposed nearly enough to such personal recounts of asylum seekers’ journeys because even with our own trials and tribulations, w still live lives of fortunate privilege compared to other countries. It’s far to easy to lose sight of worldly experiences. I think so many could benefit from listening and potentially lending out a helping hand to those that desperately need it in any way they can.

Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Amin Nawabi’s Flee easily finds a place in my top 20 of 2021.

10/10 for using Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo during that nightclub sequence.

It’s not often that movies are actually filmed in and take place primarily underwater but if done right, it feels like the perfect angle for a horror movie.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House gives you just enough time to take in one big breath before diving head first into the cold waters of a French man made lake for the rest of its runtime.

In this particular lake is an abandoned mansion that conjures a young haunted travel vlogging couple, Ben and Tina played by James Jagger and Camille Rowe, to monetarily explore its eerie presence.

Expecting to find only the large structure left standing on the lake floor, what they find inside is much more than expected and with absolutely no means of escape. This mansion is enormous and that’s clear when the couple descend upon it and swim around its exteriors but once inside the completely boarded up place, the many creepy rooms still mostly preserved in completely surrounding watery darkness makes you feel uncomfortably claustrophobic.

The dark and sinister history of the Montegnac Mansion is awakened by the arrival of its latest guests and so this aquatic exploration quickly turns into a horrifying race against time and the terrors that still lurk within this sunken purgatory. Sanity levels deplete even faster than the supplied oxygen tanks do and it fully illustrates wave after wave of dreadful and hopeless panic.

Bustillo and Maury have collaborated on a handful of horror movies since the early 2000s. From their first and still best work on the 2007 film Inside, each movie sadly seemed to get worse from there, especially their 2017 Leatherface film. This movie is easily their 2nd best movie so far. The Deep House is a rather straightforward horror movie but with technical design that is just exceptionally incomparable to any other horror movie out there.

Check it out on Hulu or Paramount Plus.

If you come across The Requin wherever you may be, you’ll see the decent looking poster with the shark plastered front and center and think to yourself “Now this looks like the latest great shark movie!” and then you’ll find out it stars the wonderful Alicia Silverstone against that monstrous looking great white and so this cinematic combination may be enough to lure you in.

It’s with great sadness that I report that neither of these aforementioned components work, together or on their own, it’s a bit too misleading in its marketing and as a result the movie is not good at all.

Director and writer Le-Van Kiet does achieve a decently original premise regardless of how ridiculous it really is. 

Alicia Silverstone stars as Jaelyn who is on a much needed vacation with her husband Kyle played by James Tupper. The two leave behind a traumatic past miscarriage and the stresses of work for a luxurious but empty beach side resort in Vietnam. It looks like a great deal of the film was shot on a soundstage with green screens.

Passive aggressively ridiculed by her husband, Jaelyn is haunted by what she’s left behind and lost but it quickly becomes irrelevant in the deadly face of survival. A late night monsoon tears apart their floating villa and then washes them out to sea. But if that’s not enough, insult is added to their injuries after their villa burns down after an attempted smoke signal, sharks begin to circle the bloody waters and feast on the lost drifters. This comes at about an hour into the film and from out of nowhere as far as the plot goes. So really the movie is more a stranded at sea survival story than it is a shark attack. 30 minutes can be enough to produce some zoological thrilling goodness. But once the sharks are revealed past their fins the awful CGI is exposed and what was left of the narrative threat is no longer there. It looks like every single shark was created differently but not intentionally or anything, like they used different CGI models and it’s painfully obvious. None of the blood shed or damage done is believable and none of the action works at all, just add it all to the pile of issues. Although the climax provides us with the best looking shark of them all, it also appears to be created differently than the sharks that initially attacked. Alicia has one final fight with this behemoth and miraculously manages to kill it in the most ridiculous way, but at this point you just have to go along with it to see the movie finally come to an end.

I really feel bad about feeling so negatively about the film because you can tell that an attempt was made to produce a thrilling survival drama. The concept’s originality is there and probably best represented on paper and Le-Van Kiets direction appears to be knowledgeable of the medium, even if it’s as straightforward as possible. James Tupper’s performance is lacking but even Alicia Silverstone, once a young and promising actor puts herself out there with an animated performance…..is just not very good at all. Nothing seems to land quite like it’s intended to and I feel bad about it. Emotional moments are meant to feel powerful, horrifying, life or death but they never achieve any of it. And then the bad CGI work wraps an anchor around the movie and drags it down into the darkest depths of the ocean where it will quickly be forgotten.

Despite how bad I feel about my opinion of the movie, The Requin just doesn’t provide anything  more than an hour and a half of riffing fun.