post

Sundance ’22: Maika Monroe is Alone and Stalked in Romania in Creepy ‘WATCHER’ 

Take the helplessness you feel when you’re in a foreign country but don’t speak the language and add in an inattentive husband and a possible stalker and you have a formula for a very bad trip abroad. In Watcher, this is Julia’s life now.  Stranded in Bucharest, Romania, the unemployed actress and wife to an ambitious marketer tries her best to grin and bear the transition. But every night, she sneaks a peek out the curtains of her apartment. And every night, a man across the street watches her back. Julia’s sanity and marriage unfurl as the specter of being watched grows larger and more dangerous with each passing day.  Read More

post

Out in Theaters: ‘IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE’

If you had told me that John Travolta would comeback from his recent Academy Award persona butchery (2014’s “Adele Dazeem”, 2015’s repulsively awkward Scar-Jo sneak-a-kiss) by playing a sand-blasted moral compass in a Ti West Western (a Western, it must be noted, that is of the genre through and through, absent of the horror flair that has, up to this point, characterized the filmmaker’s oeuvre), I woulda spit my cud. But Travolta is as present for In a Valley of Violence as it is a corn-fed, all-American, organically certified Western. Consider my head scratched. Read More

post

SXSW ’16 Review: ‘IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE’

If you had told me that John Travolta would comeback from his recent Academy Award persona butchery (2014’s “Adele Dazeem”, 2015’s repulsively awkward Scar-Jo sneak-a-kiss) by playing a sand-blasted moral compass in a Ti West Western (a Western, it must be noted, that is of the genre through and through, absent of the horror flair that has, up to this point, characterized the filmmaker’s oeuvre), I woulda spit my cud. But Travolta is as present for In a Valley of Violence as it is a corn-fed, all-American, organically certified Western. Consider my head scratched. Read More