Piercing begins with a chilling scene and intensifies from there. It’s an unrelenting, violent novel that refuses to turn a blind eye to its characters’ deranged compulsions. It’s a novel about compulsions, but not the run-of-the-mill compulsions that cause most of us to overeat, drink too much, or binge out with Netflix for seven...
Like with any art form, film is very versatile. Over the hundred plus years of filmmaking, directors had experimented with style, substance, moods, plots, and characters. They had joined movements. They had struggled to create movies that stand out, that break away from the typical, that are more about exploring themes and fulfilling artistic...
As I mentioned before, I suffered a heart attack at the end of March. That and other concerns had played havoc with my normal routine. As a result, I didn’t watch as many movies this month as I normally do. In fact, most of the movies on this list are movies I saw in...
“The book can’t complete with the screen,” Philip Roth said in a 2009 interview with Tina Brown for The Daily Beast. “It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. it couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.” When I read that quotation, my first reaction was: A...
According to Wikipedia, when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it became the world’s first best seller. Since book publishing was, at best, only a toddler, since copyright laws were nonexistent, and since it is doubtful anyone was tracking book sells statistics, I find this claim–at least in the literal meaning...
Frequent readers will know that I love my horror movies and that I’m constantly searching for new ones to enjoy. So you’ll understand why, back in 1987, when Hellraiser was released, I felt tempted to see it. Saw it I did. Since its tone was body horror rather than suspenseful horror, it wasn’t quite...
Earlier this year, to fulfill a goal to up my reading game, I devise what will no doubt go down as one of the greatest literary plans in history. I will read twenty novellas or short novels before April 30th. Since I developed this plan ten weeks from that date, it meant reading two...
At the beginning of Captain Marvel, as the logo ran–I hear Jeremy at Cinema Sins groaning and watching the second hand–the MCU did something cool. I won’t tell you what it was, because I believe realizing it as it happened was part of the experience. But I wanted to mention it and let you...
I try to watch a movie a day. Try is the keyword there, because I can’t always take the time. I have grocery shopping sometimes. But on other days, I sometimes watch two or even three movies. Over the course of a year, it balances out that I see about three hundred movies. Though...
Greta is a tense thriller starring Isabelle Huppert and Chloë Grace Moretz. It felt good to see a thriller where both the protagonist and the antagonist were female. Not since Single White Female (1992) do I remember such a line-up, and for that reason, Greta reminds me of the earlier movie. It also enjoys...
