By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Playing into the metaphysical and poetic, Mother Mary is exactly the kind of film that you would expect David Lowery to make. At his core, Lowery is a filmmaker that plays into emotion and vibes first and foremost, with all of his films carrying a level of painterly like ambiguity…
By Matthew Moorcroft Solid Recommendation Almost as nasty as an actual decaying corpse, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which is indeed the full title, revels in it’s gruesome horror. Less overtly scary and more focused on being as disgusting and gross as you can imagine, it follows in the footsteps of the titular director’s past work…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Ever hear somebody say something so shocking and unexpected you can just hear a pin drop and literally feel the air being sucked out of the room? That’s the entire impetus of The Drama, which finds the marriage between Emma and Charlie threatened just days before it’s supposed to happen.…
By Matthew Moorcroft Unsure Seemingly designed from the ground up to be as frenetic and as fast moving as possible to keep the attention of even the smallest of hyperactive children (or hyperactive, chronically online adults), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is only barely just that. A barrage of loud noise, colors, and action sequences,…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation The Earth is dying. Something is dimming the sun, and we only have 30 years to really prevent it or things are going to get bad really fast. Project Hail Mary, as a film, isn’t about climate change but it certainly feels like it in some ways; a film about…
By Matthew Moorcroft Unsure Bursting onto the frame with a loud, overwhelming jolt to the senses not unsimiliar to the very lightning bolt that brought Frankenstein’s monster to life years and years ago, The Bride! is almost as unwieldy and impossible to quantify as said monster as well. It’s the stitched together, falling apart at…
By Matthew Moorcroft Weak Recommendation One of the canon rules of horror is that usually what you don’t see is scarier then what you do see. Undertone, with it’s focus on auditory horror and a sole lead actor on screen for the entire runtime, feels like the ultimate test of that canon rule. With almost…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation It doesn’t take long to realize that Hoppers is the real deal from Pixar. Probably the studio that has struggled the most post-pandemic, small success stories like Elemental and big blockbuster hits like Inside Out 2 have managed to keep them in the conversation as their major projects, regardless of…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Maybe one of the few working directors who can actually earn the “from the twisted mind” phrase in his marketing, Gore Verbinski returns after a 9 year hiatus after audience soundly rejected the wildly underrated – and exceptionally bizarre – A Cure for Wellness and sent Verbinski into director’s jail.…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation Made on a small budget of $3 million or less, Iron Lung is something of a minor miracle in the fact that it’s even good in the first place. Mark Fischbach – better known as Markiplier both online and to his fans – isn’t necessarily a newcomer to horror or…
By Matthew Moorcroft Strong Recommendation It’s been a long time since a full blown, true Sam Raimi flick hasn’t there? Sure, he’s made a couple of blockbusters like the scattershot if entertaining Oz the Great and Powerful and the wildly misunderstood Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but when it comes to the horror…
By Matthew Moorcroft Solid Recommendation As animated films go, Arco is as animated as they come. Quite literally, in fact, as the rainbow colors that adorn it’s title character leap off the screen and feel simply just made for the animated medium. You simply just can’t tell a story like this in live action, and…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation In some ways a return to form for acclaimed indie filmmaker Chloe Zhao in terms of subject matter, Hamnet is positioned on the surface as a much deserved victory lap film after her Best Picture winning Nomadland swept audiences away and her divisive MCU flick Eternals confused those same audiences…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation Arguably the first movie to have Toronto be a main character in it’s own right, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie begins with a stunt so ludicrous and insane that you would think that they would save it for later on in the film as the big show stopper…
By Matthew Moorcroft Solid Recommendation The second film adaptation of the Japanese novel, All You Need is Kill is in a strange scenario that doesn’t happen often in the medium – specifically that of the American version being the first one out of the gate. Having previously been adapted as the great Tom Cruise vehicle…
By Matthew Moorcroft Solid Recommendation Primate is one of those movies that tells you everything you need to know about it basically right away before you even see it. A pet chimpanzee, named Ben, has gone rabid (quite literally, actually) and his loving family is now the target of his aggression. And if you know…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation Marty Mauser has a dream. He wants to not just a champion, but THE champion; a name to be remembered by history and the rest of the world. A tall order, and it’s for table tennis no less, a sport that at this point in history was only starting to…
By Matthew Moorcroft Highest Recommendation One of the best things about modern day cinema is that every couple of years, without fail, there is a new Benoit Blanc mystery available to us. The latest, Wake Up Dead Man, is probably the biggest swerve of them yet, removing itself from the class critiques of the prior…
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