The Plague, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, New Life, The Grim & the Dark, Resident Evil, Nine Days, You Won't Be Alone, Of an Age, The Bourne Identity, Coraline
The Plague [2025] - 86
Written and directed by debut at both, Charlie Polinger, The Plague is something of a [to reuse a phrase from an earlier review] “coming of age nightmare” about a group of boys on a swim team. There’s something about teen boys and the cliques and games they form that make stories like these fit right in with their weird little psyches and, whatever that thing is, Polinger has found it, captured it, and strangled the hell out of it to tell this story. The Plague is weird and tense, it’s upsetting and relatable, and it is hugely worth your time if you want something you’ve seen before [maybe even lived], but have never experienced in quite this way. A Grimm fairytale for the modern age, The Plague might even be inside you already.
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark [1988] - 55
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is the cult classic of cult classics when it comes to gothy-comedies… And not entirely for no reason. Despite my low rating of 55, there’s a lot of things this movie does that are fairly interesting, and plenty of it is worth some genuine laughs. Hell, there’s even some really prescient messaging about how presentation, dress, and even persuasion aren’t invitations for unwanted advances… It just kind of wraps all this intrigue in a bit of a nothing plot that leans really heavily on some of its less-funny bits and bobs. The film is only 96-minutes long, so it isn’t overindulgent in some obscene way, but it’s also just kind of a lot… A lot of the time.
New Life [2023] - 67
New Life, a 2023 scifi/mystery by debut writer/director, John Rosman, is… Promising. I liked a lot of the way this film presented itself and much of what it was trying to do, but it's definitely one of those early works that has a few too many ideas to truly get any one of them across in meaningful ways. Much of the visual presentation and narrative flow of this film is clever and effective [with one bit involving a teletype being particularly cool] and the story itself is interesting and unique, featuring an ending that’s pretty atypical for this kind of thing, but even at only 85-minutes long, New Life doesn’t quite have the legs it needed to keep this story sprinting along at the pace it wanted.
The Grim & the Dark [2025] - 60
A documentary checking out the history, impact, and present-state of “Grimdark” and all it encompasses, The Grim & the Dark features a somewhat unbelievable Jon Heder as he globetrots to find out just what the hell a “Servitor” is, or why these nerds are throwing handfuls of dice into box lids. Some of this was insightful, and you get to meet an interesting cast of characters, but I didn’t feel that there was ever an earnest desire for discovery or introspection; Much of the documentary felt very surface-level and wasn’t something I had to engage with in any sort of meaningful way to absorb, and the inclusion of Heder as the face of the whole thing feels more like an attention grab than it does authentic. I’m not entirely sure who this level of investigation would be for because, it’s kind of too silly and gamery for the uninitiated, but it’s also much too shallow for anyone who’s even glanced at a 40k codex before… I don’t know. It was fine.
Resident Evil [2026] - 85
Well… I saw this… Again. I’ve already written a full review and a shorty so… I don’t know what else there is to say at this point except that, besides Come True, I don’t remember what the last movie I watched more than once in a year was… Especially not more than once in theaters.
Nine Days [2021] - 96
I’ve been doing things in [loosely] this format for 5-years now [yeesh], and there isn’t a movie I’ve tracked that I think about more often than Edson Oda’s incredible 2021 debut, Nine Days. Me and my sister like to “joke” that our toxic trait is we just wish every movie was Nine Days… But none of them are. This movie got kind of buried by not only having a somewhat narrow release [only ~450 theaters nationwide], but by PIxar’s Soul having come out the year before to huge acclaim. The two films tell a very similar story, but Nine Days has such an immense magic that, to say this film is “powerful” would be to call the speed at which the Earth rotates “fast”, or the heat with which the Sun burns “hot”.
You Won't Be Alone [2022] - 87
Revisiting another of my #1 picks, Goran Stolevski’s horror/drama, You Won’t Be Alone, hasn’t held up quite as high in my estimation as Nine Days, but man is this still a great film. It’s weird and obtuse in a lot of ways, but the story this strange little Macedonian tapestry creates is so unique and interesting that its obtuseness feels more like a feature than a bug. Examining the oddity and majesty of simply being alive, You Won’t Be Alone waxes a little more poetic than many audiences might typically enjoy, but its insights and kind of sideways “inside looking in” perspective lends itself so beautifully to what it wants to be. Certainly not for everyone, You Won’t Be Alone is still a movie I recommend all the time… If one I expect most won’t totally jive with.
Of an Age [2022] - 66
Checking out Goran Stolevski’s other work, Of an Age is one of those movies to which I think I just don’t personally connect, which makes it hard to fully engage with. This is a coming of age, LGBTQ+ romance following a 17-year old boy who falls for his best friend’s older brother. Following their very brief time together, life tears them apart until, a decade later, the two are reunited by chance and mutual connections. The film has all the trappings of something I’d really love, but somehow just misses the mark on my heartstrings. I’ve bounced off a few films like this now, but I’ve also connected to others – Portrait of a Lady on Fire being one of my favorite movies in the last several years – so it’s hard to say what caused this one not to stick. Performances are great, ending is excellent, there’s just something about it that didn’t quite click for me.
The Bourne Identity [2002] - 77
I’ve been meaning to rewatch this series for a long time now, and I’m glad I finally did. I don’t think that The Bourne Identity really has much of a place here in 2026 with the likes of John Wick and some of the modern James Bond films, but I do believe that it’s to this film and its siblings that they owe the ability to now own that light. I’d love to sit down and really do some research on what was out there both pre and post The Bourne Identity because [entirely off the cuff], I really think that it set the stage for the genre moving forwards. In the way that things like Top Gun: Maverick and the aforementioned John Wick have now rewritten their respective groups, The Bourne Identity created the stairs on which they could climb. While I know this is based on a book from 1980, the film came out at the right time to take the suave spycraft audiences already loved in James Bond and blend it with the action-chic of Mission: Impossible, while grounding the fighting and conspiracy concepts from The Matrix. Maybe a stretch, but I think this landed at the right time to be beloved and remembered, rather than mocked as derivative or seen as too fringe.
Coraline [2009] - 65
With Laika on the verge of releasing something new and the best holiday of the year quickly approaching [their movie now released and the holiday past at the time of actually writing this], I figured it was time to reexamine a movie I had something of a… Conflicting relationship with. I hadn’t seen this movie since it was new, and I don’t need to explain what my previous experience was, because it’s the exact same as I remembered. Coraline is one of the longest 100-minute films I’ve ever watched. Its concepts are interesting and its characters are wacky, but its plot is so stretched and thin that it just feels like it goes on and on and on. It’s a fairly painful experience… But that’s largely offset by the technical prowess that Laika puts on full display here. There’s no one that does it like they do and, no matter how disconnected I may have been from the narrative, I was in utter awe at the artistry present in every scene. I’ve yet to connect to any of their films from a story perspective, but I’ve equally yet to be anything but astonished at the things they can create.
