Return to the complete Columbo index History remembers the 1968 telefilm Prescription: Murder as the de facto pilot episode of Columbo, one of television’s most beloved detective series, but this was neither the intent nor, really, the function of the movie. And its path to its first airing on NBC, on 20 February 1968, in no […]

Declaring Dark Glasses to be the best film directed by the legendary Italian horror master Dario Argento in 20 years is almost literally meaningless. First and foremost, he hasn’t made anything for the last ten of those years, since 2012’s dreadful Dracula 3D threatened to be the final film of his illustrious career. And that came […]

There are films for which the “here’s what this reminded me of” game can lead to some very strained and convoluted comparisons that make no sense to anyone, not even the person making them. This is not the case with Smile, which could not be more straightforwardly the film that happens when It Follows and […]

Let’s at least give Don’t Worry Darling this much credit: it’s easy to imagine this being a much drearier and more haranguing social satire than it is. In large part, this is because the film has such an extraordinarily hard time keeping any of its many ideas straight, or developing any of them to any […]

To wrap up the summer movie season, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 19: one of the specific things that the particular species of bipedal apes commonly […]

It’s very easy to look at a movie and declare it “a labor of love” whether you actually know that to be the case or not, but for Pearl, there’s no doubt about it. Literally the fact that it exists at all is the proof that it was a labor of love, and that co-writers […]

Barbarian is the kind of film whose boosters (of which I don’t entirely count myself one, though I think it’s a pretty easy recommendation for anyone with a more than passing interest in grotty horror-thrillers) would have it be the case that even mentioning that it has a story constitutes an unforgivable spoiler, or some […]

Psycho II being an actually good movie was about as unlikely a miracle as any I have ever encountered in all the annals of unnecessary sequels. To expect that kind of miracle to happen twice in a row would be far, far, far too much to hope for, and indeed, Psycho III – which I […]

If you had asked me at the start of 2022 if I thought that 2009’s Orphan had lived on as a classic of modern horror, I’d have looked sort of through you for an awkward moment in a confused, glassy-eyed way before tentatively replying “the J.A. Bayona film?” And we’d have had a beat before […]

To wrap up the summer movie season, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 5: Bullet Train takes place in the highly tense environment of a metal tube […]

There probably aren’t more than a half-dozen movies in the history of American cinema more sacrosanct than Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho from 1960, a film standing proudly alone as such a defining achievement in cinema that the mere notion of ever trying to cash in on it in any way is genuinely immoral. Which hasn’t stood […]

It would be accurate to describe Beast as “the movie where Idris Elba kicks a CGI lion in the face”. But it would be even more accurate to describe Beast as “the movie where Idris Elba kicks a CGI lion in the face twice“, which of course means it is twice as good. And as […]