Area 51, written and directed by Oren Peli, US, 2015 - ⭐½

The other film directed by the creator of Paranormal Activity. Shot in 2010 but released five years later, this is a classic found-footage movie that reminded me a lot of Horror in the High Desert 2, which, in comparison, is a masterpiece.

The plot can be guessed by the title itself, so let’s not waste time on that.
There’s a home invasion section that is difficult to watch because of the sheer stupidity of the characters’ decisions, and that’s still better than the interminable second half in the secret military base.
I have the impression that several scenes are inspired by Quatermass and the Pit, but I won’t go back and check.
Only for completists of Peli’s directorial efforts.

Saw 3D / Saw: The Final Chapter, directed by Kevin Greutert, written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, US, 2010 - ⭐⭐ (up from ⭐½)

Oren Peli didn’t direct Paranormal Activity 2, and neither did Kevin Greutert, who was working on the project before being forcefully pulled back into John Kramer’s unfinished business.

Both titles for this film sound incredibly lazy, but at least one of them prepares us for the endless instances of spikes, needles and pointy things that would have graced our eyes if we went and saw this in a cinema, having learnt nothing from The Final Destination.

This is the one where former young Indiana Jones and Boondock Saint Sean Patrick Flanery gains media visibility by publishing a book called S.U.R.V.I.V.E. (is it an acronym? What does it stand for? Or do the dots only indicate that survival happens one step at a time?), describing the lessons learnt from surviving one of Jigsaw’s traps - although we never saw him in any of the previous films.

It would be an intriguing plot, centring on people who made it through the John Kramer idea of a life-affirming experience, and it gives us the chance to enjoy one more time Tanedra Howard’s Simone, still pissed off about having to cut her own arm in the previous film. She’s probably my favourite character of the saga (sorry, Amanda!).
It also brings back the saga’s oldest character and the oldest setting from the saga, and ties up all the loose ends, as screenwriters Melton and Dunstan finally put an end (although you never know) to the Tales of Hoffman saga.

On the plus side, it’s a bit more narratively streamlined than its predecessors, as the flashback narrative only covers a couple of scenes at the beginning and the end of the film.

But it’s also the film with the nastiest traps so far - and the most fake-looking visual effects -, and it’s pervaded by an incredible amount of misogyny: all female characters suffer fates much worse than their male- counterparts, some of them for no reason at all.

So, despite the reinvigorating last couple of minutes, everybody must have been happy that this was indeed the final chapter for Saw… for a while.

Man Finds Tape, written and directed by Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

Another honest title that makes it clear we are again in found footage/mockumentary territory.
Debuting director duo Gandersman and Hall weave an intriguing story about strange events happening in a small town in Texas.

I won’t spoil where the plot goes, but the two are supported, production-wise, by another, well-established pair of creatives: one scene, specifically, has the same effect as a sign stating ‘Benson and Moorhead were here’.

I was a bit disoriented by the temporal jumps in the story and the different types of camera used having largely different resolutions (for philological reasons, I suppose). But overall, it’s an entertaining and original enough film, populated with faces that looked familiar but that I had not met before.

Lovely, Dark, and Deep, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland, US/Portugal, 2023 - ⭐⭐⭐

Another debut: director Sutherland’s first film features Georgina Campbell as Lennon, a newly appointed ranger of a National Park, full of good intentions but troubled by a past trauma that pushes her to disregard her superiors’ orders to help people.
Her past is also the reason why she sought this job: when she faces the truth behind the frequent disappearances of hikers, she will have to learn the hard way how to overcome her fears and let go.

Rather economical in terms of characters and ‘action’, this film deals with a couple of well-beloved horror subgenres, and overall is able to offer some surprises about where its story is headed.
But, while I can’t really point out what should have been done differently, I was left with the feeling that this could have aspired to be a much more gratifying watch: all the right elements were there, but still something was missing.

HIM, directed by Justin Tipping, co-written with Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

The reviews for this film were so bad that I postponed watching it even after its arrival on Netflix, despite Jordan Peele’s name attached to it. I couldn’t care less about football (American or otherwise), and a lot of it is over the top and repetitive and overall a bunch of nonsense, and the two parts of the ending are one worse than the other.

Still, this is one of those rare films where atmosphere and the style are enough to keep me entertained.
Everyone on Letterboxd is raving about Julia Fox, whom, I must admit, I didn’t know much about (despite having watched Uncut Gems) and who seems to be an interesting person. Tyriq Withers gives a very different performance from the one in I Know What You Did Last Summer from the same year.

Zoolander, directed by Ben Stiller, co-written with John Hamburg and Drake Sather, US, 2001 - ⭐⭐⭐

Watching this film immediately after HIM made me notice some unexpected plot similarities.

Also known as the only Will Ferrell performance that makes me smile once or twice, Zoolander is considered almost a masterpiece by comedy lovers: I was hoping to enjoy it more than the first time, and I confirm there are some funny bits, but most of the jokes are at the expense of Stiller’s lead character (Bee Gees’ I Started a Joke is very much on point), and laughing at people because they are ‘simple’ is not my kind of fun.

Then there are the dozens of cameos, but not everyone is David Bowie - and some don’t really support escapism today.
On the plus side, it was fun to identify the young man that will become Alexander Skarsgård. And I can happily report that my version of the Magnum is powerful enough to unlock my laptop.

Diary of the Dead, written and directed by George A. Romero, Canada/US, 2007 - ⭐⭐

Kind of the same thing happened while watching Diary of the Dead: that young woman looks a bit like… wait, she looks a lot like… is she really Tatiana Maslany?!

I wish there was more Maslany in this film. Because basically her presence is the only redeeming element in this found-footage that doesn’t even bother to try and be one, plagued with irritating characters (worst of all is the alcoholic English professor who has combat skills ‘because he studied at Eton’), didactic inserts, pedantic insistence that zombies can’t run, and a plot without surprises.

Hotel, written and directed by Jessica Hausner, Austria/Germany, 2004 - ⭐⭐½

The setting and the premise (a young woman takes a job at the reception of a hotel in the German-speaking part of the Alps - with an investigation ongoing about the death/disappearance of a woman) make this film feel like the original version of Cuckoo.
The actual development is much, much different, and very serious.

Rather than supernatural events - which might or might not be at play, thanks to the creepy doll of the Lady of the woods - this one focuses on the unease of being alone in a new place, trying to do your best and fit in-to an environment that has its own unwritten rules.
Yes, that is basically the definition of ‘folk horror’.

For my taste, this was effective in communicating loneliness and dread, but a bit too psychological and introspective, with the few events in the plot not really flowing into an interesting and believable story.
It would probably deserve a more focussed, attentive second watch.

Door Into Silence, written and directed by Lucio Fulci, Italy, 1991 - ⭐⭐

After the successful experience with Don’t Torture a Duckling last week, I decided to watch another Fulci film, chosen at random. It turns out that this was his last film, so it makes perfect sense that it’s all about the idea - and the fear - of death.

The plot follows a man driving across the US, from New Orleans - where he attended the funeral of his father - back to Los Angeles. Along the way, he finds all sorts of frustrating obstacles, from road works to a hearse that doesn’t want to be overtaken. And a mysterious woman driving a red car.

If this description doesn’t sound very enticing, the film isn’t either. You’ll understand what’s going on twenty minutes into the story, and then you’ll have to wait seventy more minutes for Fulci to officially reveal it, just to end on a very silly shot.
For the record, I tried to watch another random film of his the following night, just to stop after a few minutes as a character was being very nasty towards a cat.

À l’interieur / Inside, written and directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, France, 2007 - ⭐⭐

One of the main French Extremity films I had not yet seen, this one disturbed me more than Martyrs did, because of the topic and the triggering violence that goes on. Béatrice Dalle, queen of the genre, is as deranged as ever as she home-invades, on Christmas eve, the house of pregnant woman Alysson Paradis (sister of Vanessa), with a purpose that soon becomes very clear, and terrifying.

So, part of my low rating is due to my personal taste about what is horrific but acceptable, and what goes too far.
But part of it is objective: the terrible interior, mother CGI shots of the baby reacting to what is happening à l’extérieur are totally unnecessary. And the required suspension of disbelief about some actions by secondary characters is just, itself, extreme.

Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, written by Will Soodik, US/Canada, 2026 - ⭐⭐½

And here’s another one of the ‘best-horrors-no-best-films-of-the-year’ that I went to watch with a lot of expectation and, finally, left me cold.
I haven’t yet seen Parsons’ YouTube series, but on paper, the whole idea of liminal horror was intriguing. In practice, not so much.

Maybe it’s because I have spent a lot of time, during my non-military service, walking around the semi-empty rooms of a former boarding school. But a series of yellow spaces with some furniture inside? Not scary, not even unsettling.
At least, not after it becomes clear that the topography is stable: weird as the architecture can be, if you can map a space for repeated visits, it’s no longer scary. If it’s repeatable, no matter how weird the rooms look, it’s not dream logic.

As I watched, I thought about Lost, and I told myself: ’the red room in Twin Peaks did it much better’.
Then of course a red room came up here as well, and I almost felt at home.

This is once again a ‘feature-length film based on a short film’, and, as such, it shows some struggle in reconciling what it once was, and what it aspires to be. The label ‘insert trauma here’ is still sticking out.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is a good actor, so why does he look so unconvincing here?

Anyway, not all is lost. We know that, with insomnia, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
The same for the backrooms: something is at work here, feeding on itself to create duplicates that are less and less faithful to the originals.
Is it AI? Is it obsessive rumination over guilt?
That is what Backrooms could successfully point to.

Maybe a future rewatch where I’m not in a room filled with teenagers constantly whispering to each other would help me focus on that.
For the time being, claims that this film will become as influential as The Blair Witch Project feel greatly exaggerated.

See How They Run, directed by Tom George, written by Mark Chappell, United Kingdom/US, 2022 - ⭐⭐⭐ (down from ⭐⭐⭐½)

My memory of this film was: a lot of fun.
This rewatch did not live up to the expectations. Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are hilarious, as is the rest of the cast (second film in two weeks featuring Ruth Wilson); but the script, strong at the beginning, seems to trust too much in its meta premise (what if we wrote a Whodunnit inspired by The Mousetrap, the way Hollywood would?), while the insistence on using split screen is a dynamic, but unconvincing, choice.

undertone, written and directed by Ian Tuason, Canada/US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I thought a lot about Paranormal Activity during this film (so I’m not surprised director Tuason has been hired to write and direct the next instalment of that series), but it would perhaps be more appropriate to describe it as an audio version of Scott Derrickson’s Sinister.

America(Canada?)-based podcaster Evy (Nina Kiric) and Londoner Justin (Adam DiMarco, in a voice-only performance) host The Undertone podcast, which deals with unsettling paranormal stories. Although Evy plays the part of the sceptic in the show, she’s the one who’s affected more by a series of mysterious mp3s they received via email. But that’s because she lives alone in her family house with her terminally-ill and unresponsive mother, and because the timezone difference between the two hosts leads her to record the podcast at 3AM - and we know from The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Derrickson again) that that’s not a good time to be awake.

Objectively, I would have all the elements to complain that this is not a good plot: the worst accusations you can throw at late-stage trauma-based horror would be valid.
Tuason pushes as much as possible on audio horror, which unfortunately means nursery rhymes and the good old myth of subliminal messages hidden in popular tunes.

Still, I was tense for most of the running time, thanks to the vast, dark negative space that fills the frame in most scenes: who knows what is hiding in the shadows?

I know I will watch this film again. But I don’t know if I will like it more, or be bored by it.

Saw VI, directed by Kevin Greutert, written by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, US, 2009 - ⭐⭐⭐

I mentioned last week that a trap in Saw V reminded me of the pound of flesh from The Merchant of Venice, and here it is, this chapter opens with a trap based on exactly that concept, to literarily punish - sorry, offer a new chance at life for - two unscrupulous money lenders. Final proof that behind the expressionless face of the new Jigsaw hides an avid reader.
Saw VI tackles corporate greed and the social issue of health insurance, and this finally gives some kind of sense or motivation to a sequel (although, one of the characters is punished because he didn’t quit smoking: a bit too harsh if you ask me).
The final twist is actually satisfying, and there are some memorable sequences (the carousel trap, for instance).
Plus, this may be the first Saw where we spend some time with the victims before they wake up trapped in a basement somewhere.

All in all, this is a (maybe, the) good sequel post-Saw III.
The forward plot is, once again, the investigation to identify the new Jigsaw, but, this time, it turns out almost thrilling, with some twists and turns in itself.
The flashback part, once again, rewrites the past in multiple ways, beyond any chance of believability, but Shawnee Smith returns and I enjoyed the absurdity of it all. At this point there seem to be more John Kramer acolytes than police officers in this town. Yet at the same time, nobody really seems to believe in his philosophy.
I feel a bit sad for Jigsaw, so self-celebrating when nobody understands him.

September 5, directed by Tim Fehlbaum, co-written with Moritz Binder and Alex David, Germany/US, 2024 - ⭐⭐⭐

I missed this film in theatres, but maybe it was a good thing: the accents here are all over the place (including for the American characters) and the background is often noisy, so I had to turn the subtitles on right at the beginning.
I expected to like this film more.
I appreciated the fact that it never leaves the ABC premises to show the events happening at the Olympic village, turning the well-known historical facts into an unclear situation where nobody is really sure of what’s going on. It brought me back to the fear and shock of 09/11.
But the most interesting promise of the trailer, the risk that the journalists’ work might help the terrorists, and the professional/personal conflict that should arise, is solved quite soon and quite quickly, culminating in a ridiculous scene where the German police orders ABC to stop broadcasting, and all it takes for them to retreat is being shouted at by Peter Sarsgaard.
Was Germany really so insecure and scared of itself in 1972?
The film won Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress and five more awards at the 2025 Deutscher Filmpreis, so maybe it really was.

Windfall, directed by Charlie McDowell, co-written with Justin Lader, Andrew Kevin Walker and Jason Segel, US, 2022 - ⭐⭐

In the last year of high school, Italian students learn about a number of Italian writers of the 20th century, and few of them leave teenagers as indifferent as Italo Svevo, a friend of James Joyce whose novels showcase inept men, adults who can’t take decisions and live their life in mediocrity, often lying to themselves about their motivations.
I suspect his books hit much differently for middle-aged readers, but I digress.

My point is that I didn’t give a second thought to Italo Svevo in thirty years, until I watched this film, where the protagonist (Jason Segel) is indeed a man who doesn’t seem to know what he wants: he breaks into a billionaire’s property, but then he doesn’t know what to do, and when he’s caught by the owner and his wife, he doesn’t know how to deal with them. Things happen to him rather than because of him.
Opposite him, the tech mogul (Jesse Plemons), brimming with alpha-ness and quick decisions.
Can you imagine a film where you root for the selfish, arrogant rich guy rather than the supposedly principled common man?
Well, here it is.
I have to assume that that is the point the film wants to make, but, if so, it’s a rather uninteresting way of doing it.
Or should we root for the wife (Lily Collins, also the director’s spouse), enjoying a wealthy life but, it seems, regretting her marriage?
Everybody in this story is annoying, and not much happens, unless for contrived reasons.

Still, this film has been co-written by Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter of Se7en.
Director McDowell, son of Malcolm and Mary Steenburgen, is also (with co-writer Justin Lader) the author of The One I Love, a film I constantly forget I have already watched.

Profondo Rosso / Deep Red, directed by Dario Argento, co-written with Bernardino Zapponi, Italy, 1975 - ⭐⭐⭐½ (down from ⭐⭐⭐⭐)

When I was little, an older kid in my neighbourhood used to boast that he had watched Profondo Rosso, and survived. It was the eighties, and in Italy the admiration for Dario Argento flowed freely. I watched it for the first time five years ago, and some of that hype must have been still present in my subconscious.
This second watch was triggered by Chuck Jordan’s review, and their footnotes mentioning it about a likely inspiration for some of the Saw aesthetics.
Since I had survived it already once, and it didn’t exactly trouble my sleep, I could experience the film with more objective eyes, finding it more in line with my impression of other Argento films: stylish, but superficial, ineffective at creating a haunting atmosphere (at least, fifty years after the fact: maybe the effect back then was stronger).
There are unsettling scenes, both very explicit - like the mechanical puppet one (that has no relation with anything else) - and very subtle - such as the Blue Bar out of Nighthawks, where nobody really moves. But the story is very thin, and the investigation is just a pretext.

Forget David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Glauco Mauri and Gabriele Lavia: the real reasons to watch the film are the amazing art nouveau villa, and the soundtrack by Goblin, heavily inspired by Tubular Bells, but with a warmer prog-rock sound.
And the unsettling child song, that will resonate in your head for days.
This was the last film for Clara Calamai, a historic figure in Italian cinema, here playing Carlo’s mother with strong Baby Jane vibes.
The creepy child, Nicoletta Elmi, features in several giallos from the period, but was better known in my generation for playing the goth girl (back then we used to call them ‘dark’) in a high-school-set sit-com from the mid-Eighties, which all teenagers used to love at the time (but I suspect was actually pretty terrible).
Some animal cruelty, no doubt real, is quite upsetting. Unless that is one of the effects created by Carlo Rambaldi, who later went on to win three Oscars and design the Alien xenomorph and E.T.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, Canada/US, 2016 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I rewatched this film in a few sittings, as a mind cleanser to put me in an oneiric state before going to bed. Every time I see it, I feel like I appreciate it a bit more (but finally my rating hasn’t changed). Did I ever notice the upside-down chair?
I really loved the ectoplasmic appearances.
Unfortunately, I don’t feel this was the right role for Ruth Wilson: nothing wrong in her performance, it’s probably just that I am used to seeing her in parts with a different energy.

Non si sevizia un paperino / Don’t Torture a Duckling, directed by Lucio Fulci, co-written with Roberto Gianviti and Gianfranco Clerici, Italy, 1972 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’m not sure, but I think I watched Profondo Rosso in English. With Hemmings in the lead, it seemed natural that - even with recognisable Italian actors’ faces - everyone spoke English. But that film is set in Rome and filmed in Turin: big cities where it wouldn’t be unusual to hear a language other than Italian spoken.
Lips are pronouncing English words in this film too (although many of the adult actors here are not Italian, Thomas Milian, Barbara Bouchet, Florinda Bolkan had all been around Cinecittà for some time, and presumably could speak the language to a degree), but, set as it is in a remote village of Southern Italy, it felt just too unnatural to me to watch it in that language: I waited until I could find an Italian-dubbed version.

This was my first Fulci and, judging by his fame and the title, I was expecting a much more brutal film: instead, I was positively surprised by its restraint - probably because of the topic it deals with -, and even the nude scene with Barbara Bouchet is quite sweet.
I think it captures well, almost to a folk horror level, life in a small rural centre, precariously balanced between superstition and religion, the need to find a culprit for terrible events, and the eagerness to accuse someone who’s ‘different’.

The scene in the cemetery, soundtracked by the Ornella Vanoni song, is striking.

For non-Italians, ‘paperino’, beyond translating to ‘duckling’, is also the Italian name for Donald Duck, making the film title only slightly less confusing.

Saw V, directed by David Hackl, written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, US, 2008 - ⭐⭐

This film jumps around so much between timelines, that even talking about it can only be done in short and disconnected sentences.
The opening trap is a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, and at some point there’s another one involving ten pints of blood, which reminded me of The Merchant of Venice: I guess the new Jigsaw must be a bit more passionate about literature than he appears.
The flashback track shows Detective Hoffman’s backstory, and is mostly focussed on showing the behind the scenes of the previous films. Too bad Shawnee Smith clearly wasn’t asked, or didn’t care, to join in for this chapter: Amanda Young’s face is never shown.
The trap plot is about the importance of teamwork; this is ’the one with Julie Benz’: funnily, I recognised the former Darla from Buffy and former Rita from Dexter by her voice, because her face is mostly buried under a horrible wig.
The forward story is, again, the investigation of Jigsaw’s murder, and an excuse to revisit past locations and have cool flashbacks-by-camera-panning. Not as showy or fun as Bousman’s transitions in previous films, but a little nice touch by the new director, here at his debut after working as production designer and second unit director in the last couple of films.
The screenwriters from Saw IV continue keeping doors open for the future, although they definitely close the story for one character - in a way that annoyed me quite a lot the first time I watched this.

Prevenge, written and directed by Alice Lowe, United Kingdom, 2016 - ⭐⭐⭐

It took me ten years to manage to watch Lowe’s directorial debut - previously I was only able to find it dubbed in French on local streaming sites.
Lowe has been in many British productions, but I mostly knew her as the co-writer and co-star of Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, of which this film keeps approximately the same tone - horror with some humour injected. She also plays the main character, pregnant woman Ruth, whom we follow in her mission to exact revenge from a series of men. The reasons are not immediately clear, so we are free for a long time to imagine a wide range of horrible scenarios, while the truth is revealed slowly and skilfully, through micro-flashbacks.
Lowe goes a long way to depict her character not as a Beatrix-Kiddo-type heroine, rather portraying her as a woman troubled by worries about her pregnancy.
The result is a low-key, low-budget revenge film, which may feel a bit diluted, but is a promising start for the director’s future career.

The cast is filled with familiar faces, such as Jo Hartley from Ricky Gervais’ After Life, Gemma Whelan and Katie Dickie from Game of Thrones and, by a weird coincidence, Mike Wozniak, whom I only ‘met’ last week as a contestant in series 11 of Taskmaster, and whose demeanour I decided to make my inspirational model for the near future.

Lux Æterna, written and directed by Gaspar Noé, France, 2019 - ⭐⭐½

When Gaspar Noé opens a film with a quote about the virtues of an epileptic seizure, and then less than forty minutes in he starts shooting stroboscopic lights at you, you know he won’t show mercy until the end.
Luckily, the film only lasts 52 minutes.
Before that sensorial assault, we have images straight from (or inspired by, I’m not sure) Häxan, Béatrice Dalle telling Charlotte Gainsbourg about her unpleasant experiences with film producers and crew on the set of (what I guess is) La visione del sabba, and twenty-ish fictional minutes where Dalle directs her own movie about witchcraft, while the producers (again) of that fictional film try to find a pretext to fire her, and lead actress Gainsbourg tries to solve a domestic issue by phone. All shot, mostly, in split screen, before ’technical issues’ unleash hell on your eyes.
So yes, it’s all Noé’s way of supporting (women) creatives/witches’ empowerment against patriarchy/producers, ‘cause witches they were persecuted Wicca good and love the earth and women power and I’ll be over here.

Lights Out, directed by David F. Sandberg, written by Eric Heisserer, US, 2016 - ⭐⭐

A half hour into Lights Out I thought: ‘ok, this must be one of those movies that started as a short film, and then were artificially expanded to reach feature-length’.
And then I checked and it was exactly the case.
You know, when a good idea could sustain five to fifteen minutes, but there is really nothing else to add and it all feels like padding.
The very creepy and effective idea of seeing the shadow of a creature hiding in the dark, which then vanishes once the light is switched on, is turned into a not very subtle metaphor for depression, and how it affects the family of those who are suffering from it.
Maybe this film hit differently in 2016, when elevated horror was still quite a recent phenomenon.
There is really not much to reproach first-time director (and author of the original short film) Sandberg or his cast (almost) and crew for: it’s the story that is unsatisfying, not to mention some weird internal logic inconsistencies.
But screenwriter Heisserer (also responsible for Final Destination 5 and the remakes of Nightmare on Elm Street and The Thing), in the same year, also had an Oscar nomination for Denis Villeneuve’s majestic Arrival, so something doesn’t fully add up here.
Emily Alyn Lynd of Doctor Sleep and The Babysitter fame appears in a single scene.

Life After Beth, written and directed by Jeff Baena, US, 2014 - ⭐⭐⭐½

It’s nice, for once, to see Dane DeHaan playing a non-creepy guy. Well, as I wrote this sentence, I realised that maybe that is not true. The thing is, this horror-comedy plays a lot of the same notes as Obsession, as DeHaan’s Zach is more than happy to go along with his girlfriend Beth’s (excellent as always Aubrey Plaza) undead life status, until she becomes a bit too keen on him and her humanity fades away.
Sure, one thing is to actively wish to change someone’s feelings for you, and another is to - naturally - wish that a loved one who passed away was still with you.

Molly Shannon, as Beth’s mother, does a lot of the comedic work, and it’s always nice to see John C. Reilly, as the young woman’s father.

The fact that directors Garry Marshall and Paul Weitz have cameos in this film led me to look for more information about Jeff Baena: I learnt that he was Plaza’s partner at the time (and, later, her husband) and this was his directorial debut, having previously co-written David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (which I actively despised in 2004 and maybe should revisit). Baena then went on to direct, among other films, Alison Brie’s Horse Girl, before tragically passing away last year.

Host, directed by Rob Savage, written by Jed Shepherd, Rob Savage and Gemma Hurley, United Kingdom, 2020 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Gestures, objects, and conversations reveal that this film was shot during the COVID pandemic. Not so long ago, but still far enough that it takes a moment to readjust to social distancing, masks and elbow bumps. There’s no title card explaining the circumstances during which Host was put together. Nothing to explain why a call should end automatically after fifty minutes.
We have been through this, we know, we remember; but what will people watching it in 20 years think? (optimistically assuming that nothing similar or worse happens in the next couple of decades)
On the other hand, talking with a group of people over the internet, that’s normal. That’s the legacy of COVID. We are having countless work meetings every day with people that exist, mostly, in little squares on our screens.
We’re so used to it, that I felt like I was in this film’s chat, myself. I forgot I was watching a movie. I thought I should have lit a candle too.

The first half of this film is just perfect. The way the atmosphere slowly changes, the inevitable fakeout, the fleeting glimpse of two legs that I remembered from my first watch.
When things quickly escalate, yeah, it’s a film, borrowing from REC, from Paranormal Activity, etcetera. That’s fine.
It’s a miracle this was made.
Too bad Savage’s next films haven’t been as good.

Saw IV, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, written by Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton and Thomas Fenton, US, 2007 - ⭐⭐

This is where the Saw franchise stopped being composed of films and started a serial run. Already with the second chapter, the films were built around two parallel strands: the horror component, an A ‘plot’ based on the traps and a maze for the victims to go through, and the actual story, the B plot, centred on Jigsaw.
With John Kramer and his known acolyte out of the picture, with the fourth part we move to three different strands: to keep Tobin Bell involved, the B plot gets bifurcated into a flashback story - providing some kind of revelation about things we thought we knew - and a forward one - meant to add some elements that future episodes’ B and C plots can build on and eventually subvert.
Plus, there must be a twist for the film to end on.

With all these elements to juggle, it’s nearly impossible to weave a good film: the new screenwriters (authors of the screenplay, written but not filmed yet in 2007, for The Collector - of which I’m not a fan) pick up on a couple of characters who appeared briefly in Saw III to build their path forward, and in the flashback they give John Kramer’s story additional detail (of course, he was an engineer!) and motivation.
But Jigsaw’s philosophy starts (or continues) to get muddled: if in chapter 3 he was urging the main ‘player’ to forgive the people who did him wrong, here he is trying to convince his new target that… he should learn to let people die, to have a better work-life balance?

Director Bousman comes back again and keeps showing off his clever, on-camera scenes transitions. The cinematographer for all the previous chapters, David A. Armstrong, also returns, but the film starts the descending spiral into a much cheaper-looking audiovisual work.
The timey-wimey twists and turns are still fun, but everything else betrays the rushed schedule to put a new film in cinemas every year.

Opus, written and directed by Mark Anthony Green, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐½

I think I said it before, I would like to see Ayo Edebiri in a different role than ’the normal person in the room’. Maybe she has already played a villain or a shady person and I don’t know. After the Hunt maybe (I’m not going to Bezos away my money just to check)? Perhaps she will get there.
In Opus, her character is not very distinct from Sydney in The Bear: a fresh pair of eyes in a somewhat confusing situation that every other character takes as the normality.
In this case, it’s the music industry’s reaction to being invited by retired musician Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich, presumably having a lot of fun) to his ranch/commune, to present a long-awaited new album. His messianic-Elton-John way could be just eccentric or subtly sinister. And the distinction between happy community and creepy cult is always thin.

I see a lot of reviewers comparing Opus to another A24-produced work where a young woman goes and visit a commune in a far away location where things may not be as shiny as they seem: while I was reminded of that film by a single very specific scene, my usually very sensitive similarity detection alarm didn’t go off.
And while, in retrospect, I can see the similarity on the surface, this is a totally different movie, that wants to say completely different things. Not that I’m sure of what those things are.

渇き。 / The World of Kanako, directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, co-written with Nobuhiro Monma and Miako Tadano, based on the novel 果てしなき渇き by Akio Fukamachi, Japan, 2014 - ⭐½

Kōji Yakusho is back in a white suit, but rather than the sexy gangster of Tampopo, he’s a nasty ex-police detective, whose main way of interacting with other people is violence. I have a low threshold for depictions of sexual abuse, and this film has several instances of it, so much so that I considered stopping watching it altogether; it is also the main reason for the rating I’m giving: the tone - including a funky title sequence - seems to think this is an exploitation movie from the seventies, but the content is much darker than that. In all honesty, I am not an expert of that genre, so it might be perfectly in line with that tradition, but still, this is a 2014 film.

As I was watching this, a clear analogy came to mind: this is like Japanese Twin Peaks, depicting the investigation into the disappearance of a young woman, and the slow reveal that her life was very different from what parents and teachers thought. And Yakusho’s character - Kanako’s father, who naturally decides to unofficially investigate on the case - might be to blame for the teenager’s behaviour.

An early scene set in a school brought to mind - I’m not sure why - Confessions, and I was very pleased with myself when I found out the two films share the same director.
Kanako is played by Nana Komatsu, seen recently as the woman in Exit 8.

The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, written by Bill Lancaster, based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s novella Who Goes There, US, 1982 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I watched The Thing a looooong time ago; if I remember correctly, it was on a laptop, and the quality was not great. I know I liked it, but I was a bit nervous about revisiting it because, of all the John Carpenter films I’ve seen since, I enjoyed only Halloween and In the Mouth of Madness, and even then, not massively.
Since my monthly Internet consumption was dangerously close to depletion this week, instead of looking for something to stream, I decided to pop the Arrow Blu-Ray I bought months ago into my player.

I’m happy to report that I really liked it: the paranoia that takes up the second half of the film felt a bit repetitive after a while, but the mystery presented in the first half hour (introduced by the amazing first sequence) gives it enough steam to make us forget the fleeting impression that we are looking at a variation on Alien.
I think that Carpenter works better for me as a director when he’s not shooting his own script; here the screenwriter was Burt Lancaster’s son.

On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan, written by Budd Schulberg, inspired by Malcolm Johnson’s articles Crime on the Waterfront, US, 1954 - ⭐⭐⭐½

Right, are you ready for another very unpopular take? I say ‘unpopular’ to avoid what would seem, objectively, the right word, which is ‘ignorant’. Because if Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins and Jack Nicholson and the Academy and pretty much every critic on paper and on Letterboxd say Marlon Brando’s acting is sublime and the best performance ever seen on screen, that must be objectively true.
Me, I thought of Joey Tribbiani in almost every scene, except for one where I mentally super-imposed the image of an actor in his second Academy-award winning performance crying ’look how they massacred my boy’.
Brando took me out of the film, as if there was a spotlight pointed on him all the time. Perhaps it was charisma. For me, it was unnatural.

So, ok, another blow to my film-assessor self-esteem.
I loved Karl Malden and his ‘ascension’ scene - although, no subtle at all.
As for Elia Kazan, I have a policy of separating the art from the artist (but this is a discussion for another time), but if the artist uses their work to justify their controversial behaviour, it’s hard for me to assess them separately.
The film won Best Picture and seven more Oscars (including for Brando, Kazan, screenwriter Schulberg, and first-time-on-screen Eva Marie Saint - denying the three nominated supporting actors the award).
Criterion lists “Kazan’s defiance” and “Brando’s genius” as two of the three reasons for the importance of this film. So I guess I’m entitled to consider it just fine.

Saw III, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, written by Leigh Whannell and James Wan, US, 2006 - ⭐⭐½ (down from ⭐⭐⭐)

The last of the Saw films to see the creative involvement of the original authors, and - if you ask me - the last one worth watching, before the series fully embraces its new torture soap opera genre (of course, that won’t stop me from rewatching the other ones).
Original screenwriter and man-in-the-bathtub Whannell too embraces the genre: the traps are quite nasty and harder to witness than I remembered, and Amanda Young, whom I remembered as the true hero of the saga, comes out as a needy, insufferable person. She does have an arc throughout this first trilogy, and while - let’s be honest - it makes no sense, I liked her take on Jigsaw’s philosophy: it’s like Whannell and co-writer James Wan openly admit that all the ‘morality’ side of the plot is, indeed, just rubbish, and that we just enjoy watching people suffer. Except for me, I’m here for the twists.
The original screenwriters also seem to want to nicely close the story so they can move on to doing some other, more insidious stuff, but still a lot of seeds for future instalments are scattered here and there.
From the technical side, there are some fun scene transitions that, apparently, use practical shots rather than editing.

Passenger, directed by André Øvredal, written by T. W. Burgess and Zachary Donohue, US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐

The trailer, which promised a hyper-generic, second-rate, horror, made me initially dismiss this film, but then the reviews came out rather positive. The director of The Autopsy of Jane Doe has prepared for us two great setpieces, and a couple that genuinely care for each other. But it’s ultimately a reactionary tale, where the good old values win, and those who pursue an alternative way of life are depicted as a selfish group - they may be not as bad as the True Knot, but still this is not a great advertisement for the nomad lifestyle.
Even though it’s almost completely set outdoors, it manages to squeeze in the worst horror trope of all, the ankle drag.
For long stretches of the film I wasn’t engaged enough, so I mentally took note of how my interest grew and then waned, resulting in this chart (timing is approximate):

House of Wax, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, written by Carey Hayes and Chad Hayes, based on Charles S. Belden’s play The Wax Works, US, 2005 - ⭐⭐½

Also known as the movie where Paris Hilton dies, so much so that I guess even the poster is supposed to be depicting the socialite melting away. Let’s say her acting skills don’t exactly shine as she spends most of her screen time snogging her on-screen boyfriend. But frankly, every character in this film is annoying and rude, with the exception of Elisha Cuthbert’s Carly.
The film, written by future Conjuring creators, strings together hicksploitation, a little bit of Friday the 13th, Brian De Palma’s Sisters and even Phantom of the Opera, a hint of Saw contraptions, plus, I guess, the 1953 version of the same story, because there is always a reason a character is named Vincent.
It’s glossy, and clearly put together carefully - today we would say algorithmically - to appeal to the teen public of the time. But I was expecting something better when I read ‘produced by Robert Zemeckis’.
This is also the first film by director Collet-Serra, and he mostly spends it on close-ups, which I guess are supposed to evoke claustrophobia, but always annoy me immensely.
On the plus side, I enjoyed the creepy atmosphere of the town, and the climax is quite effective. It is followed by the most pointless revelation, but ok, at that point I was glad it was over.

10x10, directed by Suzi Ewing, written by Noel Clarke, United Kingdom/US, 2018 - ⭐⭐½

All through this film I was distracted by the strong cognitive dissonance between knowing the actors (Kelly Reilly and Luke Evans) are British, the writer (Doctor Who’s Mickey, Noel Clarke, appearing in a cameo) is British, the director (I looked her up, because this is her only feature film) is British, but still the story is set, as far as I can tell, in the US.
As the plot unfolds, I perhaps understood why: to try and avoid some potential backlash back home.
Ah, the plot: the man, clearly not a professional criminal, kidnaps the woman from a parking lot, in full sight, then locks her in a not-so-small (check the title) secret room in his isolated house.
Clearly he thinks the woman has done something wrong that’s connected to his past: for half an hour all he does is keep asking her to tell him his name, and being unhappy with her answer.
The backstory is slowly revealed in a goofy attempt at show-don’t-tell, where the man goes through his favourite video playlist, getting angry at old news reports (that are actually all tell and no show), and very emotional at old home videos, like a low-tech Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
Because I guess he must be a good guy, after all.
I think we are supposed to feel our support slowly switch from one character to another, but as things started getting (slightly) crazy, I was always on the woman’s side.
Again, I was uninterested enough to keep track of my engagement level throughout the 86 minutes:

Black Bear, written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine, US, 2020 - ⭐⭐

I remember mentioning this film on my old website, when it was first announced, with a certain anticipation; then… I lost track of it, probably because of a lack of distribution on my shores, never to be mentioned by anybody again. Not a good sign.
But that anticipation has stayed with me, dormant but present, so when I finally watched it this week, I was expecting great things. That didn’t come.
Its two-part structure feels sort of a film followed by its meta remake, but instead of the usual 15-20 years that this process normally requires, all it takes is a title card to separate the two.
I would be inclined to think there is something I missed between the two iterations of a couple’s relationship threatened by the arrival of a third person. But after reading other people’s reviews, I found that even the positive ones confess they can’t actually explain the point.
So, what’s left is a bravura performance by Aubrey Plaza, and good supporting roles by Christopher Abbott (first time I see him and think ‘hey, it’s Christopher Abbott’) and Sarah Gadon (who always makes interesting choices).

The Punisher: One Last Kill, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, co-written Jon Bernthal, US, 2026 - ⭐⭐½

Fifty-ish minutes of unpleasantness and hard violence featuring Bernthal in Frank Castle mode, unleashed before being presumably restrained to an acceptable person in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
If you like kill!kill!kill!kill! movies, you’ll appreciate this one. My appreciation for the genre usually requires some kind of mythology to sustain them (see John Wick), and while I’m sure that The Punisher has quite a backstory, I haven’t seen the Netflix series and my knowledge of the character comes exclusively from Daredevil: Born Again. For people like me, Marvel added a cameo by Karen Page/Deborah Ann Woll, which left me a bit confused because I have no idea of the previous relationships between these two characters.

Die My Love, directed by Lynne Ramsay, co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

During the first act, seeing Jennifer Lawrence being bored, alone, in her house, I thought this film seemed a women-driven response to Darren Aronofsky’s mother-exclamation-point¹. Then terrifying things started happening, and it became the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time. We have all heard post-partum depression horror stories, and this one goes the extra mile.
As a man, I couldn’t help identifying with Robert Pattinson’s useless guy (this is the second time this year his weddings turn into a nightmare).
What can you do when you no longer understand the behaviour of the person you love? When it seems that she doesn’t always understand her own actions?
I hope I wouldn’t be a partner as rubbish as this pointless husband, when things escalate, how would I react? Would early support prevent escalation?
This is a harrowing experience, one that even the screenplay doesn’t want to follow down to its realistic end, taking instead the artistic way out - and not one we haven’t seen before.

Obsession, written and directed by Curry Barker, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐

I’m thinking of ending things. And by things, I mean writing these posts. Or even watching films altogether.
The stellar reviews of this film made me doubt myself more than ever before. I didn’t enjoy it, but I also didn’t like Milk and Serial, which was in a lot of Top Tens for 2024.
I found it incredibly monotonous, and while watching I had the time and mental detachment to think about what I would have done. Which was, do immediately what the lead character takes almost two hours to even consider. I’m told that is the point of the film, and that’s where I come to doubt my ability to rate a movie - prioritising my enjoyment/involvement rather than trying to understand the filmmaker’s intentions.
But there are so many other things in the story that don’t make sense to me. And other scenes that you can see coming a considerable amount of time in advance.
So I’m be inclined to think that director Barker is given much more credit than the film itself grants him. Like there’s some hype machine at work (I thought I was going to watch a niche horror, but the room was fuller on a Friday afternoon at 14 than in most Saturday screenings).
Technically, horror-wise, it has its effective moments (pretty sure Barker has seen Evil Dead Rise and Talk to Me).
I think it’s a cruel film, and it enjoys its cruelty. Milk and Serial did as well. They make Barker a good fit for the Texas Chain Saw franchise.
Inde Navarrette is a star already.
For a real review of Obsession that explains most of my objections much better than I can in these hastily written notes - with spoilers - check the always excellent Chuck Jordan.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, based on Iain Reid’s novel, US, 2020 - ⭐⭐

The first time I watched this film, right when it came out on Netflix, I didn’t like it; but it happened in some unusual circumstances, and I had always meant to give it another try: after all, I have been a fan of Charlie Kaufman since Being John Malkovich, and I believe Eternal Sunshine is a masterpiece.
I loved Synecdoche, New York but I never pushed myself to watch it a second time (the first time was weird enough to add to the experience: on my laptop, from a USB stick, with a hundred other people hunched on their PCs, and Kaufman himself somewhere in the same building).
But this film, despite Jessie and Jesse, and despite having enjoyed the novel, felt like it totally derailed in its last act. Like the ‘pure artistic vision’ of author Kaufman was a bit too much for a Netflix film, or a commercial one.

I would like to be able to declare that my second watch, on a bigger TV and without the worry I was ‘forcing’ my less-Kaufman-inclined then-girlfriend to endure it, was more successful.
But I can’t.
Able to pay more attention, I did pick up more meaning. The worry about time passing. The distant affection for where you came from. The Pauline Kael book on the shelf. The song from Oklahoma-exclamation-point¹ (although I’m not sure whether it has a meaning per se). The self-centred protagonist that is not necessarily who you thought the protagonist was.
I mean, as an intellectual exercise, it might work. As I write this paragraph, I can see how some pieces of the puzzle fall - more or less - into place and form a picture of the writer-director’s intent.
Put it in a museum room with some props from other Kaufman works, call it ‘Being Charlie Kaufman: the exhibition’, and it will be perfect.
Out of that context, it feels like a verbose, self-indulgent work, devoid of the irony that made his most famous scripts perfectly balanced.

Influencer, directed by Kurtis David Harder, co-written with Tesh Guttikonda, Canada, 2022 - ⭐⭐⭐½

Honestly, I watched this film a few days ago, and it has completely evaporated from my memory, as transient as the social media stories posted by the people it depicts.
It is perhaps because of a sort of ‘stream of consciousness’ style in the script, moving from one scenario to another so that it never feels predictable, at the same time keeping an overall consistency.

Saw II, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, co-written with Leigh Whannell, US, 2005 - ⭐⭐ (down from ⭐⭐½)

At some point, in 2023, I decided to challenge myself and go through the whole Saw franchise, revisiting the original film and then binging through a first watch of its subsequent chapters, at the rhythm of one movie per night (two on weekends). Rather than the grossness of the ’torture porn’ component, what I retained was the extreme silliness of the ‘plot’, changing and mutating and retconning from one film to the next.
So, I was left with a perception that these films are ‘fun’ and, despite my awareness that anything after Saw III is utter nonsense, in multiple occasions I considered buying the €80 boxset - but I never did.
At the end of this quite depressing week, I thought of doing a full run again, starting from the second episode, The One With Donnie Wahlberg aka the guy at the beginning of The Sixth Sense. After all, what is Saw if not Taskmaster with a puppet in place of Alex Horne?

I didn’t like this too much on my first watch, and even less this time. The only points making the film interesting are the twists at the end, whereas the rest - except for that one Amanda-centric trap - is forgettable, as are most of the characters - if we can even call them characters: I’m sure they have a name and a face, but I couldn’t remember most of them. They are never given a chance to survive, and by the end of the film it’s not even clear why they are chosen to ‘play the game’ in the first place.
So, it’s not surprising to (re-)learn that this was a totally unrelated film, written by Bousman and later re-purposed by original creator Whannell.
But it’s the one that gives Tobin Bell more screen presence (aside from Saw X), and compared to Wahlberg’s cop, it manages to make Jigsaw a misunderstood hero.