I'm always interested in directorial debuts from successful actors, and what the choice of project says about their ambitions. And I definitely didn't expect Anna Kendrick's first effort as a director to be a grim serial killer movie. I'd heard the story of how Rodney Alcala appeared on a 1978 episode of "The Dating Game" in the middle of his killing spree, and that's an irresistible plot for a movie. But in practice, it's tricky to figure out how much of the film to devote to Alcala's brutal murders and how much to devote to his appearance on a campy game show. And I think Kendrick pulled that off pretty well, she pulled off the period piece details and the disturbing subject matter with style and nuance -- it really felt like she probably watched Zodiac and took a lot of notes, even if her movie wasn't quite up to that high level of quality. 

After the incredibly obnoxious marketing for Challengers, I was pleasantly surprised that it was a pretty compelling movie with really impressive performances. West Side Story made me a fan of Mike Faist, Josh O'Conner is possibly even better than him in this, and this is easily the best Zendaya role I've ever seen (for what it's worth I don't think she's very good in "Euphoria"). I like the first half a lot more than the second, especially when they drag out the final stretch as long as possible with lots of gratuitous slow motion -- also a tennis movie should have one character smashing their racket in anger, not four different scenes with four different characters smashing their rackets. That stuff at least fits into the over-the-top operatic emotion of the thing, though, it's a memorable creative choice. 

I collected some Gawker Media checks around the same era Cord Jefferson did, so I always root for him and enjoy seeing a blogger become an Oscar and Emmy-winning Hollywood power player. I wanted to love American Fiction and merely liked it, but it's still a pretty damn good debut feature. For a movie with a plot so similar to The Producers, it just felt like they could've made it a lot more viscerally funny, I never really got further than polite chuckles at the moderately audacious moments. Still, great cast, one of those movies where everybody was just perfect and memorable in their role whether they were in the movie for 5 minutes or two hours. 

Peyton List plays the ghost of a teenage girl in Girl Haunts Boy, much as she does on the series "School Spirits." What a strange way to get typecast! This movie is moderately charming but somehow both more earnest and more cartoony than "School Spirits." 

I've been curious about the Terrifier movies for a while now, and after Terrifier 3 hit #1 at the box office I decided to finally check them out. I've seen a lot of low budget horror movies that are roughly as stupid as the first Terrifier -- my wife and I watch horror movies every Valentine's Day, and we frequently pick some random B-movie based on an intriguing premise and then laugh our way through the bad acting and cheap visual effects. So it's weird to watch a movie as mediocre as Terrifier knowing that it would eventually become a lucrative franchise. I'm a fan of gore and creative in-camera effects, so some of the death scenes were entertaining, but sometimes it's just outright bad. 

The second Terrifier movie is a huge improvement from the first without entirely being what I would call a good movie, or even an above average horror movie. I feel like they gradually get a handle on how to make Art the Clown a really charismatic, entertaining presence, though, and that's hard to do considering that he never talks and his face is buried under heavy makeup. 

I grew up on Garfield comics and the cartoons with Lorenzo Music's voice. And while I recognize as an adult that that stuff hasn't aged terribly well, I'm still nostalgic enough for it to be offended by a computer animated Garfield voiced by Chris Pratt, with Samuel L. Jackson as Garfield's father in a weird origin story plot that really didn't feel like it fit with the Garfield canon. My son, who doesn't care about OG Garfield, liked the movie, which is all that matters I guess. 

I've never really held Dazed And Confused in high esteem, or much of Richard Linklater's work in general. But I enjoyed what he and Glen Powell did with Hitman, and decided to check out the first time they worked together. It's almost impressive how Everybody Wants Some!! has even less actual plot than the kind of brainless old school coming of age comedies it's emulating, but the cast is great and it works as a loose series of extremely engaging scenes. And then the entire cast raps, in character, over the credits, which I did not expect at all. 

The story in this documentary is pretty wild. I think every popular recording act's online fan community has its weird stories, but this one fan that hacked into Tegan's e-mail, posed as her to countless fans and shared demos and personal information, is just a real horrible piece of shit, and in the movie you see the toll that took on Tegan and Sara after they built this big passionate fanbase that really cared about their music, that they were taken advantage of and had to become a lot more private and more guarded. The worst part is, at the end of the movie, they're still not really sure who the culprit was or if they'll pull any of this stuff again. A real feelbad movie, but one I'd recommend anyway. 

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