March 2026 [23-29]
Lost in Starlight, What Maisie Knew, Send Me No Flowers, The Brood, Seasrching, 13th, Oculus, True Detective: Night Country
- Lost in Starlight [2026] - 59
Lost in Starlight, a South Korean scifi-romance from director Han Ji-won and writer Kang Hyun-joo started life as an ad for a Korean jewelry company called Stonehenge… And it really really shows. Part teenybopper romance and part PTSD drama, Lost in Starlight whips back and forth between its genres so quickly that you’re just as likely to need a chiropractor as a tissue by the end of it. This is a really frustrating watch because the animation is very good, and the moments in which we experience Nan-young’s PTSD are [unironically] some of the best depictions of trauma I’ve ever seen in animation — they are heavy, intelligent, and intense —… But anything that aren’t those short moments feel like they’re written by a 13-year old creating an anime from their friends’ journal entries. Had Lost in Starlight chosen to be either a serious drama or a cringe-fest romance, it might have worked OK… But it doesn’t, and, in ripping between both concepts all the time, it severely cheapens its excellent drama while spotlighting how weird and immature its romance is. I can see how the anime crowd would like this but, if you aren’t already into the artform, this certainly isn’t going to get you on board.
- What Maisie Knew [2012] - 84
A unique take on a genre with many entries, What Maisie Knew sees both Alexander Skarsgård and Joanna Vanderham thrust into leading roles as incidental step-parents to the effectively abandoned Onata Aprile as the titular character, Maisie, while her parents prove again and again that they, themselves, are wholly incapable of effectively raising this wonderful little girl. While maybe a touch long here and a smidge saccharine or trite there, I like a lot of what this movie did and am not terribly surprised to see that the directing team behind it also shot my #66 of last year, Montana Story, because it has both the strengths and weaknesses of that film [incidentally I gave that an 82, which also tracks]. I’m generally impressed any time a movie with a child star isn’t either exploitative around that fact or distracting because of their performance, and What Maisie Knew manages to be on the positive end of both those concepts while also standing entirely on its own as something moving and worth your time.
- Send Me No Flowers [1964] - 75
Recommended by a friend, I’m almost always wary of both comedies and film from this time period. While there’s greats from any decade, I just tend to find the stories and presentations from this era particularly disconnected from what I want in media, which is also my feeling on comedies at large… Send Me No Flowers, however, manages to be both funny and bypass many of my complaints from the times… Most of the time anyway. While not all of its bits work, Send Me No Flowers has a genuinely funny premise that’s also well set up and appropriately drawn out. It’s a fairly basic situational comedy, but it manages to tie all of its ends together in ways that generally make it larger than the sum of its parts. While you do have to let go of the inevitable “literally just say what’s going on and all of this can be over” issue that anything like this has, Send Me No Flowers is mostly clever and succinct enough so that you’ll laugh just long enough for the credits to roll.
- The Brood [1979] - 32
Speaking of movies that make you laugh: David Cronenberg’s The Brood might have been scary when it originally came out but, in 2026, it’s so exhaustingly stupid, dreadfully boring, and poorly paced that you’d wish it was a satire and not something made with actual fear in mind. Don’t get me wrong, some of the concepts and the overall plot-on-paper are interesting, but all of it is so poorly executed that I don’t know why this has any sort of cult following. Some of the effects are great, but most are comical to the point that I hardly believe they were ever good, the story just goes on and on and on without anything happening for ages and ages, and the entire plot is so absurdly communicated that it’s difficult to come up with any reason to care about any-thing or any-one. Between their most recent movies and this, I am wholly unimpressed with both the Cronenbergs outside of The Fly and Possessor, and the stale garbage I’ve seen from them elsewhere makes me rethink my memory on those as well.
- Searching [2018] - 88
But enough about things I didn’t like, here’s one I really really did. Searching is the astonishingly impressive debut film for both Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian about a father looking for his missing daughter. Working similar to a found footage film, Searching is told entirely though front-facing cameras, newscasts, and screen recordings. Dissimilar to [most] found footage films, Searching [almost] never gets stale in its presentation, has to reach to make its concept work, or leans on its chosen format of storytelling to create drama/ tension that the narrative itself doesn’t support. While I found the ending a touch tidy for my tastes, I’m incredibly impressed at how easy it would have been to make this movie cheesy, simple, and forgettable, but both Chaganty and Ohanian have clearly worked hard to bring all of its various technical and presentation elements together to tell a story beyond just that of its characters and dialogue. This is a piece with very clever environmental storytelling, intelligent use of tech we all know and remember, and a seamlessly complex mystery that will have you both guessing and gasping up until its most final moments.
- 13th [2016] - 90
A documentary chronicling the “end” of slavery and how it’s morphed into entirely new forms of oppression and restraint, Ava DuVernay and Spencer Averick’s 13th is no less poignant today [possibly even moreso] than it was when they released it a decade ago. Pairing well with the 2026 Best Documentary nominee, The Alabama Solution, I don’t have a ton to say about this because it says it well enough entirely on its own. This is an easy recommendation for anyone wanting to either be more mad at the current state of things, or at least a little more in the know.
- Oculus [2013] - 63
A Flanagan of Flanagans, 2013’s Oculus is certainly a movie that exists. Like most things Mike Flanagan, Oculus has some really neat ideas and a story that wants to say more than its characters do, but then only executes on 60% of everything it presents, throwing the rest entirely to the wind. Compounding its narrative foibles, Oculus is a noticeably cheap film that actively suffers from very bad audio mixing, phony lighting, and a made-for-TV presentation that makes the entire experience just sort of… Distracting. Technical issues aside though, Oculus is one of those “what is reality” horrors; a tricky genre where you have to establish some sense of truth in order for the audience to become invested/ care when said truth is being manipulated… Something Oculus fails to do harder than most. Even worse, there was a point in the movie I realized I didn’t even understand what the characters’ goals were, making nothing have any sort of purpose, reality or not. Oculus has a lot of the ideas I liked and executes a lot OF the ideas I liked well but, overall, this whole thing should have remained a short film where it [likely] wasn’t so drawn out and aimless. Good try Mike, I’m sure we’ll meet again.
- True Detective: Night Country [2024] - 44
What. In. The. Hell. Happened. Here. Talk about only executing on 60% of your ideas, True Detective: Night Country somehow manages to be the show’s shortest season and its most drawn out and empty. It can’t seem to decide if it wants to develop and cultivate things that exist, or throw them away and introduce entirely new things to toss at a later date, so it just sort of… Does both somehow? I’m hopeful that the creators of this season don’t know what “themes” are or how to incorporate them into whatever this story was trying to be because, if they do know those things, this is an even sadder outing from a show otherwise filled with television near-perfection. Because I had some very annoying questions after finishing this ice-hole of a season, I watched a few interviews and read a couple articles to find some answers… What I found instead was a pairing of videos that not only showcases season director Issa López’s incredible ability to say absolutely nothing with about a million words, but encapsulates what sets this season apart from the others better than I ever could. I’ll grouse no more about this incredibly banal, standard-TV garbage, and just link you the first video in the attached image instead. What a waste of 6+ hours.
