Tag: Horror

  • The 10 best movies about the workplace

    Americans spend about one-third of their lives at work. That translates to roughly 90,000 hours, although in fairness that figure probably includes plenty of time spent watching the clock and scrolling through TikTok. The workplace, being such a huge chunk of modern existence, is ripe for melodrama and farce, and everything in between. What follows…

  • The 25 best love stories on film

    This just in: Moviegoers love romance. From the very start––beginning with The Kiss in 1896––cinema has excavated emotional gold from affairs of the heart. Big-screen love stories are so pervasive, in fact, that most of us know the tropes by heart (pun intended), from the meet-cute to that inevitable conclusion in which someone, usually male,…

  • The 15 best coming-of-age movies

    From Pip to Holden Caulfield and everything in between (as well as before and after, for that matter), the coming-of-age story has been indispensable. There are a multitude of variations, of course: a first love or heartbreak, that first encounter with mortality, learning a momentous truth about a parent or friend, discovering right and wrong.…

  • The 15 best school-centric films

    For good or ill––or, more accurately, for good and ill––school is where we learn our socialization skills (or lack thereof). Oh, it’s also where we just plain learn, of course: reading, writing, arithmetic and whatnot. But there are also crucial lessons to be had out of the classroom, whether that be in the cafeteria, the…

  • The best movies of 2025!

    For cinephiles, 2025—much as with nearly every other facet of society—was not for the faint of heart. Netflix’s intended purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery has ominous implications for the long-term future of movie theaters. The introduction last September of a fully AI-generated actress named Tilly Norwood flipped out Hollywood for a period. New ideas continued…

  • 2023 Mother’s Day movies: Beau Is Afraid & Evil Dead Rise

    For all those celebrating Mother’s Day this weekend, I recently caught up with two pictures currently in theaters that would offer an interesting double feature for the occasion … provided you have an ambivalent relationship with that poor woman who went through labor for you, who scrimped and saved every penny for you to go…

  • The Roost (2005)

    The Roost is for horror fans who fondly recall the heyday of drive-in theaters and pot-addled midnight screenings. Director Ti West’s über-low-budget debut mines the less-is-more approach carved out by the likes of George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead and early John Carpenter pictures. The premise is lean. Four young people (Karl Jacob,…

  • The Exorcist (1973)

    Even 50 years after audiences got the holy bejesus scared outta them in packed movie theaters, The Exorcist remains, in my estimation, one of the most frightening films ever made. Released the day after Christmas in 1973, it almost immediately leapt from blockbuster to cultural phenomenon, fueled by reports at the time of some moviegoers…