The first-person horror movement born in the wake of The Blair Witch Project has resulted in movies as good as Paranormal Activity and as bad as Paranormal Activity 2, but all up and down the chain of quality, one thing has remained constant: virtually all of these movies are interesting primarily because they are shot […]

Paranormal Activity 2 is just a lil’ bundle of problems. I’d be inclined to say that it is a perfectly fine film in and of itself, considered in a vacuum, whilst being a completely unacceptable prequel to Paranormal Activity; and this is exactly how I took to describing the film when I first stepped foot […]

I am either the ideal person to discuss Paranormal Activity, or the absolute worst person imaginable. See, up until really recently, I didn’t have any idea that the film was apparently the object of a huge viral marketing blitz. Somewhere, I picked up that it was made for under $20,000, and I was aware that […]

It may be shamelessly derivative of countless other horror films, it may be the latest in a long run of American remakes of foreign movies deserving of a proper release, and it may be suspiciously timed to feel like nothing but a mercenary knock-off of Cloverfield, but this much about Quarantine certainly shocked me: it […]

There is no doubt in my mind that the most interesting development in cinema right now is the curious explosion of first-person camcorder movies (somebody needs to come up a name for the style soon, but not me). It seems highly unlikely that any of the three films so far made with this aesthetic – […]

Whatever else is true of Cloverfield, I must give J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves credit for making one of the few films to use 9/11 imagery in an effective and appropriate way. It is entirely possible that the last time I saw a film that played a similar card without coming across as exploitive or […]

There’s no way around it – Brian De Palma’s new Iraq film Redacted is a complete mess by just about any conventional measure – but it is also as great a proof as I’ve ever seen that a movie can be a complete wreck and still be totally compelling. In fact, it might well be […]