In high school, my drama club had an odd little exercise we used to help practice lines and tweak our on-stage timing. We would recite our lines as fast as we could while the next actor to speak would say…
Amy Dunne’s One Mistake
[Warning: This article discusses spoilers!!] David Fincher’s brilliant Gone Girl is a sinister pas de deux between a husband and wife trapped in a self-destructive relationship of cataclysmic proportions. After framing her husband Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) for her murder…
‘Dracula Untold’ Review
[WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS] So You’re a Wallachian Ruler Being Invaded by Turks… Hello! If you’re reading this, then it means that a ruthless force of Turks is threatening to conquer your quaint Romanian kingdom. But don’t worry! This guide is…
‘Annabelle’ Review
[WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS] My nights as a toddler were haunted by a smiling clown doll perched on the top of my dresser. Its plainness was the source of its menace; the idea that its smiling visage masked a hatred and…
‘The Equalizer’ Review
Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer left me with three suspicious hunches. First, I think that the climax where the eponymous avenger of the victimized and downtrodden brutally dispatches a group of Russian mobsters in a home improvement warehouse was the first…
‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’ Review
There are only so many ways to reformat and recontextualize the various twists, turns, betrayals, and shock revelations that make up the detective genre. So the wise writer realizes that the detective must become just as memorable as the mystery,…
The Film Canon: Princess Mononoke (1997)
In his landmark study The Hero with a Thousand Faces, American mythologist Joseph Campbell defined what he believed to be the “monomyth.” He summarized it as such: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region…
