20 Best Movies To Watch After 28 Days Later (2002)
Immaculate
According to the press tour for Immaculate, Sydney Sweeney first auditioned for the film years ago. Despite not getting the role at the time, the script made a sizable impression on her. Thus, when she had enough clout, she immediately pursued it once again. Alas, for most of the jump scare-heavy but not especially frightening, horror movie, it’s difficult to understand why the script so captured her heart. After a brief prelude that would cost Immaculate little to lose, audiences meet Sister Cecilia (Sweeney) at Italian customs. After surviving a fall through the ice in her childhood, Cecilia felt called to serve God although not sure how. When her Michigan congregation closed, the young nun felt even further adrigt from His will. However, an invitation from Father Sal (Álvaro Morte) feels like it might be her true purpose. Therefore, despite not speaking Italian, she accepts his invitation to a remote convent specializing in hospice for nuns. Mother Superior (Dora Romano) and another novice nun, Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli), greet her kindly. The fellow Bride of Christ who makes the biggest impression, though, is Sister Isabella (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi). She brings sharp bitterness to her first encounter with Cecilia, softening to warn Cecilia off taking the convent's vows. When the new nun rejects the advice, Isabella doubles down on that initial attitude. The seeming professional rivalry only increases when Cecilia discovers she’s pregnant despite being a virgin. Continue Reading →
Dolls
Ethan Coen goes solo for a raunchy, silly comedy-thriller. When the Coen brothers announced back in 2021 that they were taking a temporary break from working together, the anguished wails of film nerds could be heard around the world. It wasn’t anything personal – indeed, they've reportedly reunited to work on a horror movie – but rather just a desire to do their own thing separately for a little while. Their time apart resulted in two very different projects: Joel’s critically acclaimed The Tragedy of Macbeth, and now, Ethan’s Drive-Away Dolls, a good-naturedly raunchy crime caper that occasionally flounders under the weight of stale, fetishy stereotypes. The film opens with a gruesome death and a briefcase that needs to make its way from Philadelphia to Tallahassee. Also about to hit the road south are a pair of friends, brash, free-spirited Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and buttoned-up, bookish Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). Marian wants to pay her aunt a visit, while Jamie, kicked out of her apartment by her fed-up girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein), has nothing better to do and goes along for the ride, hoping to loosen up Marian along the way.. Continue Reading →
Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos directs a sumptuous adult fairy tale featuring Emma Stone at her very best. Here’s the thing about Yorgos Lanthimos: you’re either on board with him, or you’re not. Even in The Favourite, arguably his most accessible film, there’s a sort of joyful grotesqueness to it, leaving the audience laughing and wincing simultaneously. His latest offering, Poor Things, is his most visually dazzling film yet, with moments of stunning beauty and bittersweet insight, but still isn’t afraid to test the audience’s sensibilities. It’s a film about what it means to be alive, every little disgusting aspect of it. Based on Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Poor Things opens in dreary black and white London, where eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is overseeing an experiment that’s both miraculous and horrifying. Baxter, whose face looks like it was carved into several pieces and then put back together the wrong way, has brought a woman back to life after she committed suicide. The woman, whom he’s renamed Bella (Emma Stone, with a magnificent pair of eyebrows), initially has the mind of a toddler, but she’s learning and maturing at an astonishing rate. Bella refers to Godwin as “God,” and so far knows no one and nothing else but him and their home together. Continue Reading →
Blood Rage
Serve up this bizarre, oddly funny 80s slasher as part of your holiday entertainment feast this year. Though Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s retro horror double feature Grindhouse met with audience indifference, the collection of fake movie trailers during its “intermission” became amusing pop culture ephemera. Of the four featured, Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” is probably the most fun to revisit, mostly because of its loving dedication to capturing the unique seediness of an 80s slasher film. There’s something so familiar about the murky film quality, the low budget special effects, the incoherent plot (it appears to be a trailer for two different, unfinished movies stuck together, as was the case for many 80s horror movies), the glimpses of T&A, and of course, that hilarious voiceover and excellent tagline, that it seems unbelievable that it hadn’t actually already been made. Though it took over 15 years, Thanksgiving is finally a full-length feature, released to largely positive reviews just last weekend. It is not, however, as has been claimed elsewhere, the first Thanksgiving slasher film. Before that, there was 1987’s Blood Rage, a movie that leans into all the best and worst tropes of its genre, while also being deeply strange and often undeniably funny. Continue Reading →
Killer Joe
Upon the news of the passing of William Friedkin, every headline reporting on the news focused on two films. It’s not surprising that the media spent so much time talking about The French Connection and The Exorcist, two bona fide masterpieces that paved the way for a new era of American filmmaking. What was disappointing was this seeming willingness to reduce a cinematic legend’s legacy to a burst of time in the early 1970s, thus dismissing the five decades that followed as either negligible or outright unworthy of interest. Continue Reading →
Sayen: La cazadora
At the risk of making a "getting a lot of Sorcerer vibes from this" guy out of myself, The Hunted—William Friedkin's 2003 old-master-hunts-rogue-student thriller really does make for a fascinating counterpart to his earlier men-on-a-desperate-mission masterwork. Both delve into the lives of damaged, forlorn, isolated men on perilous quests for deliverance. And both of those quests lead deep into madness. Both pointedly contrast man-made, flame-choked hellscapes (Sorcerer's exploding oil well, The Hunted's secret mission amidst the Kosovo War) with the vast, amoral green of the deep forest (Columbia and Oregon, respectively). Both turn on setpieces that thrill while maintaining a grounded (if not necessarily "realistic") feel and weave surreality in with care. Continue Reading →
Saw
Thinking about getting into the Saw franchise 10 movies in? Here’s what you need to know. This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn't exist. With an inevitability that is oddly comforting in such a scary and uncertain time, a new Saw movie is coming out at the end of this week. As you could assume by the “X,” Saw X is the tenth film in a franchise that, just based on its lack of continuity alone, could conceivably continue for the next three decades or so. If you’re thinking about now, after all this time, finally getting into the Saw franchise, here are a few tips to aid you in your journey towards redemption by way of giant bear traps clamping down on one’s skull. Continue Reading →
Stoker
There's more than one transition going on in Park Chan-wook's 2013 thriller Stoker. Yes, the film tells the story of how the seemingly carefree India (Mia Wasikowska) goes from worshipping her father to worshipping her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode). But the Hitchcockian thriller -- and it is one, beyond the shadow of a doubt -- was also Director Park’s first English-language title. Continue Reading →
Kill List
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
The modern age of sequels, spin-offs, and all other franchise extensions has amplified complaints about how derivative follow-ups can be. As a result, sequels have garnered a bad reputation, and it’s not unearned. Continue Reading →
Last Night in Soho
Has any other director in recent years had as frustrating a creative decline as Edgar Wright? Discounting his feature debut—the 1995, no-budget A Fistful of Fingers—his streak was white-hot. Two series of Spaced both developed and prefaced his earnest eye for nerd culture, leading up to what would become his Cornetto Trilogy. His work was so loving, so finely tuned, and, especially in the case of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, some of the most pop-culturally keen around. However, Baby Driver couldn’t help but sit in neutral; it was a pet project missing heart. With that out of the way, perhaps there was something more substantial to come next. Continue Reading →
Halloween Kills
With the release of The Rise of Skywalker and the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the term “fan service” has come to mean going to extremes in order to please fickle audiences of a TV series or film franchise. Though framed as an acknowledgment and appreciation of fan support, it feels forced and phony, an Easter egg hunt where a plot should be. While David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s 2018 reboot of Halloween was far from a perfect film, they were determined to make it their own, rather than continuing the same interminable, by then thoroughly ridiculous storyline. Its sequel, Halloween Kills, however, feels like whatever Green and McBride were originally trying to do was shoved aside in favor of winks and nods at the “true” fans of the series. The body count is much, much bigger, and almost laughably gory, but if you’re looking for any kind of coherent plot and characters not doing anything but the stupidest things imaginable, look elsewhere. Continue Reading →
Sweet Girl
Director Brian Andrew Mendoza and Jason Momoa go back way before their newest collaboration, the Netflix feature Sweet Girl. Not only did Mendoza serve as the cinematographer for Momoa’s 2018 action vehicle Braven, but Mendoza has also produced several other Momoa projects and even made a small appearance in the actor’s 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie! Unfortunately, their rich history together doesn't inspire a greater level of depth (or basic entertainment value) in the latest entry in the Netflix DTV action world, Sweet Girl. Continue Reading →
Escape from New York
Man, Escape from New York. What a picture. It's one of the standouts of director/co-writer John Carpenter's damn-near-unmatched 1976-1988 run of stupendous filmmaking, a man-on-a-mission film with a driving sense of urgency that still makes time to breathe in its mood and world. Dean Cundey’s widescreen cinematography captures the ruined prison island of New York in deep blacks and dense color and gorgeous widescreen framing. Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s score is cool and moody. The main theme alone is best described as “indelible.”The ensemble is a murderer's row of great actors with fantastic faces: Adrienne Barbeau, Isaac Hayes, Donald Pleasance, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, and the one-and-only Harry Dean Stanton. Each does unforgettable work. Continue Reading →
The Tomorrow War
It's clear from the starting gun that Paramount originally intended to push The Tomorrow War as a major summer theatrical release. But given the pandemic, Amazon Prime Video has stepped up to rollout this 140-minute sci-fi action romp starring Chris Pratt of Marvel’s Cosmic corner and Jurassic World fame. Continue Reading →
Dracula
So there’s this fabulous sequence about three quarters of the way through Bram Stoker’s Dracula where nearly all the characters left alive are speeding to Transylvania and Dracula’s castle for the film's climax. On one side of the race are Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) , barrister Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), his fiancée Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), and three adventurers/friends. Continue Reading →
Scream 4
For the horror genre, April 15, 2011, marked a handful of notable dates. On one hand, it was the 15th anniversary of when Scream started filming, starting with the 11-minute sequence in which an onscreen Drew Barrymore, thought by the masses to be the star, was eviscerated in the name of her killers' pop culture fetish. The movie not only reintroduced the slasher film back into the mainstream, but it also brought back one of its maestros. Of course, that'd be Wes Craven. Continue Reading →
The Crow
While the first movie in the series was stylish & unexpectedly moving, it was tainted by cheap, empty sequels that forgot what made it special. You don’t have to have seen The Crow to know the story behind it. It’s one of the great Hollywood tragedies, like the Twilight Zone crash, or the Poltergeist curse, where watching them feels a little forbidden and eerie. That’s particularly true for The Crow, because the scene in which star Brandon Lee was accidentally killed with a prop gun was left more or less intact. Granted, there’s some clever editing and use of a body double, but it’s close enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. I shan’t spend too much time recounting The Crow, because, again, even if you haven’t seen it, you’ve sort of seen it (and also it’s already been written about at length on this very website). I will say that I rewatched it for this project, and was surprised to see how well it holds up. It might be perhaps the most early 90s movie ever made, but unlike, say, Reality Bites, it’s in a way that’s still cool and stylish. The swooping urban landscape shots, created almost entirely with miniatures, are still a feast for the eyes, and would be put to even greater use four years later by director Alex Proyas, in his masterpiece Dark City. Sure, the villains, who have names like “Tin Tin” and “Funboy,” are laughably over the top, but they’re balanced by Lee, undoubtedly a rising star, who plays doomed hero Eric Draven with subtlety and genuine human emotion. Continue Reading →
Skylines
When the Harvesters attacked, they caught humanity flat-footed. We weren’t ready for the sudden arrival of a deep-space armada. Or for a fleet of spaceships armed with mind-mucking lasers. Or for an army of biomechanical Pilots powered by the washed brains of select humans. Continue Reading →
The Pale Door
You don’t watch a movie like Aaron B. Koontz's The Pale Door, you rewrite it in your head. Old West outlaws facing off against a coven of witches, that’s a good start for the story, it’s simply a question of restructuring everything else, like getting rid of the pointless backstory, or letting one of the already few non-white characters make it to the end alive, or maybe cutting down the number of hypermacho mustachioed men to two rather than five, or giving the witches any other motivation for their behavior than needing virgin blood to survive. Any one of those changes would have at least slightly improved The Pale Door. Sadly, it’s an inert, dreadfully dull mess that tries for some From Dusk Till Dawn-style “you thought it was this kind of movie, but it’s really this kind of movie” shenanigans, and falls flat. Continue Reading →