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  Sinners Nominated for 16 Academy Awards in 2025, director Ryan Coogler's  Sinners is a master class in modern filmmaking that transcends the horror genre and establishes itself as a touchstone of 21st century ingenuity. Probably best known for the hit films, Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever , Coogler has proven himself to be a reliable auteur of high-quality projects that repeatedly counter the narrative that movies led by black directors, and featuring mostly black casts, can't have widespread appeal to audiences across the board.  In Sinners , the identical twin Moore brothers--nicknamed Smoke and Stack--return to their hometown in rural Mississippi at the height of the Great Depression. Both survivors of the WW1 trenches, they've spent the last few years enjoying the upscale lives provided by their gangster bosses in crime-ridden Chicago. Having absconded with a princely chunk of change pilfered from their employers, the pair plans to open a juke j...
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Leviticus  In an Australian coastal town that's seen better days, two male classmates at the local high school find themselves falling in love. Despite the repressive nature of their cultish evangelical community, the boys wrestle playfully and make eyes at one another, stealing kisses and cigarettes when they break into an abandoned mill on the outskirts of town. Naim is the quiet, buttoned-down new kid on the block while blonde, curly-haired Ryan is a swaggering cocky boy from the other side of the tracks (to be fair, the whole town looks like it's on the other side of the tracks).  When Naim catches Ryan and the pastor's son, Hunter, engaged in a heavy-duty make-out session, he freaks out and heads straight to the parsonage to rat the boys out to Hunter's parents. Such is the father's distress that he summons a "deliverance healer"--a sort of exorcist --to cast out the entity causing the boys to engage in such unseemly behavior. As the healer chants a p...
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Bar-Bar-Bar-Barbarian Another day, another directorial debut. Today, I'm talking about Zach Creggar's  Barbarian , a truly scary thriller that successfully resurrects many of the tropes found in 1970's grindhouse cinema. Creggar, co-founder of the comedy sketch series, The Whitest Kids U' Know , also acted in TV sitcoms Friends with Benefits , Guys with Kids and Wrecked before switching gears in 2022, when he wrote and directed what proved to be his breakout film, Barbarian . An unlikely director of horror, Creggar has gone on to even greater success with the hits  Weapons (see my August 15, 2025 post ) and Resident Evil (released nationwide this past September).  Much like Weapons , in fact, the plot of  Barbarian  unfolds through the eyes of three very different characters. On a dark and stormy night (cue organ music), a young woman named Tess arrives in a sketchy suburban enclave of Detroit where she has booked an Airbnb the night before a major job inter...
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Maleficent Obsession  It is that time of year again and after jumping ahead to the spooky season with last week's post, I'm ready for a rip-roaring month of witches, ghosts, goblins and all-around weirdness. Today, I'm starting off with another young director's debut feature film, Obsession , released in theaters last May, and grossing a whopping $519m at the worldwide box office so far. 27-year-old Curry Barker, like Kane Parsons in my previous post, also began his career on YouTube. After moving on from his sketch comedy channel, Barker wrote and directed the 62-minute horror thriller  Milk and Serial in 2024 for a grand total of $800. Failing to find a studio willing to distribute his film, Barker uploaded it to YouTube where you can still view it for free. After going viral,  Milk and Serial garnered significant attention from Hollywood and, thus, led to the movie we're discussing today.   Owing a major debt to W.W. Jacob's 1902 short story, The Monkey'...
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Backrooms A little background on today's subject: Kane Parsons is a 21-year-old independent film director whose debut, Backrooms , skyrocketed to #1 at the box office when it opened this past May. As of this writing, the movie has grossed more than $400m since its release. Originally developed as a YouTube series (when Parsons was 17), Backrooms  quickly went viral, attracting the attention of several movie studio executives and industry luminaries, including Osgood Perkins (film director, and son of Anthony) and James Wan (architect of the Saw , Conjuring , and Insidious franchises), who signed on as producers of the film.  Initially I wasn't certain if I even wanted to write about Backrooms after viewing it. For one thing, I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about it. I'm still not 100% sure but I've somewhat come around in the past couple of days, now that I've had time to think about it. So, there is no "in-a-nutshell" way of breaking down what thi...
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