The “home invasion” subgenre has been flipped on its head a number of times, enough that Villains’ concept of two petty criminals breaking into the home of a couple of actual demented psychopaths isn’t exactly new. Like numerous other exercises in genre, however, Villains’ aim isn’t to...

In the social wasteland that is the end of the 2010s, empathy seems to be on its way out. Daniel Scheinert, one half of the directing duo that made 2016’s similarly scatological tale of understanding, Swiss Army Man, returned in 2019 (along with collaborator Billy Chew) to ask: What if you could...

In spite of its pedigree as writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to surprise horror hit It Follows – and the fact that it played in competition at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival – Under the Silver Lake was only accorded a token theatrical release this past spring (if being shown...

Gaspar Noé is the living embodiment of the adage that nothing exceeds like excess, a filmmaker whose works are designed to overwhelm the senses, events to be experienced (or endured) rather than narratives to be followed. A Dionysian dose of decadence and depravity, Climax is cut from the same...

Of the four zombedies released this year — also including The Dead Don’t Die, Little Monsters, and Zombieland: Double Tap — it’s the Japanese import One Cut of the Dead that breathes new life into the genre of the living dead. A massive success in its home country, the film earned small...

The end of the 1970s saw some of the American filmmakers who had risen to prominence during the decade come under fire due to their hubris. The enormous price tag and years of bad press for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) set that director back. Martin Scorsese’s New York, New...

It’s a common enough sight in Christmas films: holiday shoppers admiring animatronic window displays and taking advantage of the sales at department stores while appropriate music plays over the loudspeakers. In 1984’s hard-to-find Comfort and Joy, which opens with a rendition of “God Rest...

Washington Irving’s 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a classic of Gothic horror, an atmospheric and ambiguous tale about a schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane who encounters a possibly supernatural foe known as the Headless Horseman. Tim Burton’s film Sleepy Hollow, released...

“Another movie from an old TV show,” sighs a character at the beginning of 2000’s Charlie’s Angels when confronted with the fictional T.J. Hooker: The Movie. Coming at around the same time as the feature-film versions of Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, The Avengers and Wild Wild West,...

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the...

In 1989, the popularity of the Nightmare On Elm Street series and its flagship character, Freddy Krueger, were still going strong. Wes Craven, who'd created them both, had parted ways with the series due to creative differences, and his attempts to break out of horror with hybrid films like the...

We knew on Jan. 1, 2000, that the hysteria surrounding Y2K had been overblown. But before that, the fears that the so-called “Millennium Bug” would cause computers to cease working (or, at the very least, display the wrong date) had engendered a hundred-billion-dollar cottage industry of...

Ever since the proliferation of the mobile phone, horror filmmakers have to go out of their way to explain why their characters can’t use them to get out of whatever horror-movie scenario they’ve landed in. Either someone complains they can’t get a signal – prompting everyone else in the...

The fictional metropolis of Gotham has long been a stand-in for New York City, and with Joker, director Todd Phillips borrows (you might even say outright steals) from several New York movies of the 1970s and early ‘80s that showed the city’s skuzzier side, including The King of Comedy (1983),...

Quiz Show opens with a sale. Its first scene follows investigator Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) as he speaks with a car salesman about the latest and greatest Chrysler 300. He learns about its features: a state-of-the-art radio, 17 coats of paint, and more power than anyone in Washington. The salesman...