Month: August 2025
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An International Marriage
An International Marriage I learned a foreign languagebecause I wanted to speak to you.Learn not just your words,but your childhood,your grief, the way your motherfolded everything in prayer,the unspoken silence of why your father left the room without saying goodbye. I studied your syntax so Ican read your scripture.But, I mispronounced your sorrows,placed the wrong…
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The Rain Knows My Name
The Rain Knows My NameThe rain never forgets me.It waits—in the cornersof my quiet house—for that first tasteof morning coffee to come—and for meto look upand noticethe darkening sky.It crawled and fell the same wayon her last day of hospice.She watched the ceiling tilesform clouds—listened tothe rain tap the window.I held her hand.The rain held…
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A Peach Seed Thrown Away
A Peach Seed Thrown AwayIt was late spring—the kind of daythat wears winter’s breath.I was seventeen,waiting for the 6:42 a.m. trainto take meto my college interview.I wasn’t sureI wanted to go.The station was mostly empty—just the usual commuters,coffee cups steaming—small altars of routine.He stood near the vending machine,maybe a few years older,maybe not.He wore a…
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Arguing with the Dead
Arguing With the DeadBegin by calling her by name,not the one etched on the granite monument in front of you,not the one printed on the birth certificate—that temporary name another motherwas forced to dream upin the haze of post-labor fade,in the ecstasy of seeing youfor the first time—something that grew for nine monthsinside this other,and…
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The Roses: Thorns in the Wallpaper
Jay Roach’s The Roses is a domestic demolition derby dressed in gourmet frosting and architectural ambition. It’s a comedy of manners turned feral, where Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch claw through the wreckage of a marriage with the elegance of two people who once loved each other deeply—and now weaponize that love. The film dances…
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Caught Stealing: The Art of Losing Badly
Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is a bruised valentine to New York’s underbelly, a film that stumbles, bleeds, and occasionally dances through its own wreckage. It’s a comedy of errors, so lacerating it leaves claw marks, a noir so drenched in absurdity it forgets to be cool. Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson is a man who can’t…
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The Birds Remember Everything
A lyrical meditation on city birds, memory, and instinct. This poem honors the quiet rituals of return, grief, and the histories we refuse to name.
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The Thursday Murder Club: Murder, Memory, and Llamas: A Cozy Death at Coopers Chase
The Thursday Murder Club arrives not with a bang, but with a chuckle and a well-folded cardigan. Chris Columbus directs with a gentle hand, letting the film unfold— a retirement home newsletter—pleasant, occasionally poignant, and peppered with gossip. Helen Mirren leads the charge as Elizabeth Best, a retired spy whose gaze could still dismantle a…
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Eenie Meanie: The Gospel of the Gas Pedal
There’s a moment in Shawn Simmons’ Eenie Meanie when Edie, played with feral grace by Samara Weaving, stares down a muscle car like it’s an old lover she’s trying to forget. The engine hums. The past beckons. And the film, for all its genre-bending ambition, begins to gallop. In his directorial debut, Simmons doesn’t just…
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It Feeds: The Hunger Beneath the Skin
There is a quiet dread in Chad Archibald’s It Feeds, a film that moves not with thunder but with the slow, deliberate pulse of something ancient and buried. It is not a scream at night but a whisper in the walls. Ashley Greene’s Cynthia is the anchor of this haunted vessel, a clairvoyant therapist who…
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Jonathan Moya vs Jonathan Moya
Jonathan Moya vs. Jonathan MoyaI know this will happen one day—I walk into a diner with my wife,during the Costa Rican stopoverof our South American cruise.The waiter says, “Table for Moya?”I say, “Yes.”Another man stands up.He says, “Si, aqui.”We stare at each other.Same first name.Same last name.Same spelling.He has two middle names.I have just one.Different…
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On Swift Horses: The Ache Beneath the Gallop
Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses unfolds— a memory half-recalled—its edges blurred, its center pulsing with longing. The film is not so much a story but a quiet reckoning, a meditation on our lives in secret and the desires that gallop beneath the surface. Anchored by Daisy Edgar-Jones’ restrained yet emotionally resonant performance as Muriel, the…
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My Ghost Catalog
My Ghost Catalog There are ghosts that haunt me—that will not let me see them,only feel their essence.The ones that prod my skinwith maternal hands,announce themselves to my senseswith the scent of mangoes,pan de aqua,the chanting of forgotten lullabies,the tingling of milkdropped onto my tongue—all the light heavinessof memory.They curl beside me in sleep,cribbing me…
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The Bayou: Gator Meth and Mourning
The Bayou” is a film that crawls out of the muck with a mouthful of teeth and a heart full of grief. Directed by Taneli Mustonen and Brad Watson, it’s a monster movie with a survival streak, a swampy fever dream that tries to balance emotional weight with reptilian chaos. It doesn’t always succeed, but…
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Recurring Dream 101
Recurring Dream 101I askthe dream again—where did I lose her?Was it in the gestures of departurecreased with our knowings?—The red scarf she removes before our boarding—just after the breeze passes through us—a quick and unspoken thing-that doesn’t linger—the scarf she folds precisely, carefullyand places inside her blue windbreaker pocketlined with the warmththat shields her from…
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Honey Don’t: Sweet, Sour, and Stabbed: A Bakersfield Ballad
Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t is a cracked mirror of noir, a queer thriller that dances between menace and mischief, mystery and melodrama. It opens with a corpse in a car and ends with a flirtation at a stoplight, and in between, it spins a tale so tangled it could knot your shoelaces. Margaret Qualley’s Honey…
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Eden: The Garden That Would Not Bloom
Ron Howard’s Eden is a fevered meditation on the fragility of paradise, a film that dares to ask whether utopia can survive the weight of human desire. It opens with a promise—a couple fleeing the corrosion of modernity, seeking purity on an island untouched by the world’s noise. Yet what unfolds is not a cleansing,…
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Night of the Zoopocalypse: The Gum-Beast Manifesto
In the tradition of barnyard revolts and dystopian fables, Night of the Zoopocalypse arrives with a snarl, a growl, and a gelatinous thump. Directed with uneven but earnest flair by Richard Curtis and Roderigo Perez Castro, the film is a comic zombie romp set in the Colepepper Zoo, where the animals are not just caged—they’re…
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Relay: The Echo Chamber of Ash
David Mackenzie’s Relay is a film of quiet urgency, a thriller that trades spectacle for surveillance and gunfire for guilt. Riz Ahmed plays Ash, a fixer whose anonymity is his currency, and whose voice is never heard directly. He speaks through relay services, burner phones, and the silence of a man who has seen too…
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The Trouble With Jessica: The Trouble with Carpets, Clafoutis, and Corpse Logistics
Matt Winn’s The Trouble with Jessica opens with the kind of dinner party that makes you want to RSVP “no” just in case someone brings a memoir. The film sets its tone early: brittle banter, wine-fueled revelations, and the creeping dread that someone’s going to say something unforgivable—or die. Jessica (Indira Varma), the uninvited guest…
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The Map that Leads to You; The Cartography of Longing
Lasse Hallström’s The Map That Leads to You is a film that badly wants to be your summer crush. It flirts with destiny, winks at heartbreak, and occasionally trips over its charm. Adapted from JP Monninger’s novel, it’s a story that knows its genre tropes but tries—earnestly, sometimes awkwardly—to elevate it into something archetypal. It…
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Brief Encounter on Aisle Five
Brief Encounter on Aisle FiveIt is this way:She sees him first—aisle five, cereals— where the honeyed light fall softly on him— and her. The way he cradles Cheerioson the cart’s edge—firm in his handsso if they slip, they fallinto the safety of the cart,into the touch of his little girl-—lets her knowhe once belonged to…
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War of the Worlds: “War of the Wha?”: Surveillance, Aliens, and Baby Showers in the Apocalypse
Rich Lee’s War of the Worlds, starring Ice Cube as Will Radford, is not so much an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel as it is a bureaucratic meltdown with aliens, flash drives, and a baby shower that somehow ends the apocalypse. It’s a film that asks: what if the fate of humanity depended on a…
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Whoppers
WhoppersI keep the malted milk orbnestled inside my cheek,waiting for the next film cut—this Hershey-forged planet,slowly spinning toward legend,its lacquered chocolate shellwhispering to my molars,then sliding past my throat,down the cathedral of my gut,until my bowels, reverent and ready,release the myth in a soft, brown comet.I was watching—Odysseus Rex: The Iliad Reckoning—the inferior parody of…
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The Siege at Thorn High: The Thorn That Remains
Joko Anwar’s The Siege at Thorn High opens not with violence, but with memory. The prologue, set during the 2009 Jakarta riots, is a wound that never closes. It introduces Edwin, Silvi, and Panca as children caught in the crossfire of racial hatred. The assault that follows is not just physical—it is generational. The film…
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Night Always Comes: The Mercy of the Clock
Vanessa Kirby’s Lynette does not walk through Night Always Comes—she scrapes, pleads, and burns through it. Her performance is a tremor held in the jaw, a woman whose body has become a ledger of debts unpaid and promises broken. The film opens with her already exhausted and cornered, and the following night is not a…
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Meeting Ms Leigh: The Stillness Between Words
In Meeting Ms. Leigh, director R.S. Veira crafts a quiet meditation on the nature of love, memory, and the ache of being known. It is a film that resists movement, choosing instead to linger in the spaces where conversation becomes communion. Landen Amos plays Carter, a young writer adrift in search of meaning, and Jeanine…
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Harvest: The Land Was Never Ours
Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest is a film of slow erosion, where the soil of a village is not merely tilled but stripped of its memory. Adapted from Jim Crace’s novel, the story unfolds in a remote Scottish hamlet, its medieval rhythms disrupted not by monsters but by the quiet arrival of enclosure, surveillance, and suspicion.…
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Americana; Ghost Shirts and Gasoline
Tony Tost’s Americana arrives- a dusty jukebox in a half-lit bar—full of promise and static. It’s a film that wants to sing the ballad of a broken country, and sometimes it does. Sometimes it just hums. With a Lakota ghost shirt as its sacred MacGuffin and a cast of misfits chasing it like salvation, the…
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Nobody 2: The Vacation That Bled
“Nobody 2 arrives not with the sleek vengeance of its predecessor, but with a bruised heart and a broken pinky. Bob Odenkirk returns as Hutch Mansell, the weary assassin who once danced through Russian mobs with a coffee mug and a snarl. This time, he’s limping toward redemption in Plummerville, a theme park that smells…
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KFC Nocturne with Drive-In Fugue
KFC Nocturne with Drive-In FugueBack when Kentucky Fried Chickencame only in Original Recipe—before Extra Crispy,before the Colonel turned cartoon—and Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidrahruled the Drive-Ins in rubber vestments—my mother packed us four kids and mystepdad into that yellow Chrysler Newport,its trunk already echoing with chicken bonesand the breath of last week’s feast.We drove toward…
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Moon: The Body Knows Before the Mind
In Moon, Kurdwin Ayub directs with a quiet pulse, letting the body speak before the mouth does, letting silence stretch across gilded rooms and dusty training mats. Florentina Holzinger’s Sarah is a woman of muscle and memory, a fighter who has lost her fight, now wandering through a world that doesn’t know what to do…
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Fixed: The Testicle Gospel of Bull
There’s a moment in Fixed when Bull, the Staffordshire Terrier voiced with manic sincerity by Adam DeVine, gazes at his testicles and calls them his “hairy, dangling muses.” It’s absurd, grotesque, and weirdly poetic—an emblem of everything Genndy Tartakovsky’s latest animated fever dream dares to be. This is not a film for the faint of…
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Sharp Corner: The House That Watches
There is a quiet dread that pulses beneath Jason Buxton’s “Sharp Corner,” a film that never shouts but always trembles. It opens with a promise—a family moving into a new home, a fresh start, a clean slate. But the slate is cracked from the beginning, and the cracks widen with each passing car, each screech…
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Caught by the Tides: The River Remembers
Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides is a film of quiet persistence, a meditation on time’s erosion and the stubborn dignity of a woman who refuses to be erased. It moves not with urgency but with endurance, tracing Qiao Qiao’s journey through the shifting landscapes of China, both geographic and emotional. Shr carries the film’s weight with…
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Prayers Between Us
I do my laundryin the rhythm of my mother’s prayers—each crease a rosary,folding divineto divine.I count the timesher perils met mine—with hands that trembledat my fever,hands burntin a kitchenunseen,List the register of her and mine shared frailties:the way we flinched at sudden joy, unsure it would stay,All the letters written to my heart—the notes she…
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Freaky Tales: Green Light in the Dark
There’s a pulse beneath the pavement in Freaky Tales, a throb of resistance and rage, of grief and neon hope. Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, this horror-tinged anthology unfolds across four interwoven tales set in 1987 Oakland, each steeped in real locations and historical echoes. The film is a fever dream of punk…
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Weapons:, “The Roots Beneath Maybrook”Weapons:
There is a sickness in Maybrook, and it does not arrive with thunder or blood, but with silence. Weapons, directed by Zach Cregger and starring Julia Garner, opens with a quiet horror: seventeen children vanish at 2:17 a.m., leaving behind only one boy and a teacher who will not be believed. What follows is a…
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Sanctuary
SanctuaryThey sit on a stone bench in the sanctuarypressed against the highway’s edge—listening to bird songs intertwine overheadin this cage of golden mesh,five blocks long and ten stories high.One is blind, the other legless.The blind one, wearing his old army jacket—the replacement for the one torn to shreds in the flash—tilts his head to the…
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Freakier Friday: Earthquakes, Bake Sales, and the Song That Broke the Curse
Twenty-two years after the original Freaky Friday, Freakier Friday arrives with a cracked mirror and a full heart. It’s a sequel that doesn’t try to outdo its predecessor so much as reflect it—older, messier, and more generous. Lindsay Lohan returns as Anna Coleman, now a music producer and mother, and Jamie Lee Curtis as Tess,…
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Bob Trevino Likes It: The Kindness That Misses and Lands
There’s a strange tenderness in Bob Trevino Likes It, a film that stumbles through grief, estrangement, and digital connection with more heart than polish. Directed by Tracie Laymon, it’s a story that doesn’t always know where it’s going, but it walks with such sincerity that you forgive the detours. It’s a movie about finding family…
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The Pickup: Steel Hearts and Dye Packs
Tim Story’s The Pickup is a film that doesn’t so much sprint as swagger, a caper with a crooked grin and a bruised heart. It’s a mixed bag of comic bravado and emotional weariness, anchored by Eddie Murphy’s quietly magnetic performance as Russell Pierce, a man who’s seen too much and wants only to see…
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Borderline: A Review with Bite and Whiplash
In Borderline Jimmy Warden directs with a taste for the absurd, the unsettling, and the kind of fanfare that thrums behind obsession. Borderline lands somewhere between fever dream and exploitative thrill ride—but it rarely stays in one genre long enough to unpack its luggage. This is a movie that jerks, dazzles, whimpers, and chuckles inappropriately…
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The Eulogy I Couldn’t Give
The eulogy I couldn’t give to my mother at her funeral I gave to my father at his celebration of life.It was a sentimental piece I shaped more for comfort than truth,imagining him— the first ghost to cross the thresholdof the house I bought in a new subdivisionstill raw with fresh pavement and silence—where I…
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Final Destination; Bloodlines—Bloodlines and Broken Threads
There are moments in Final Destination: Bloodlines when fate feels less like a script and more like a fever dream passed down through family bone. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein lean hard into the lore’s more elegiac tones, dialing back the franchise’s manic edge in favor of a generational haunt. Death still delivers,…
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Quiet Remittance
Quiet RemittanceI didn’t follow my father’s instructions this time.I just tucked his ashes into my inner coat pocket,where they warmed me with the good memoriesof pregame paella feasts and watching the Hurricanes,in the built over old Orange Bowl now Miami Marlins Stadium.All the anesthesiologists, the lawyers, his employees—his old crew—performed his scattering script line by…
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The Naked Gun: “Lethal Nonsense: The LN Files”
The case opens with a bang—literally. A villain cracks a safety deposit box labeled “P.L.O.T. Device,” and from that moment, Akiva Schaffer’s reboot of The Naked Gun declares its allegiance to the absurd. Liam Neeson, our new LN, steps into the trench coat of Frank Drebin Jr., son of the original LN, Leslie Nielsen. The…
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The Bad Guys 2: Claws, Chaos, and a Kiss in Orbit
“The Bad Guys 2,” directed by Pierre Perifel and JP Sans, continues the story with a pulsing mix of ambition and mayhem. Sam Rockwell’s Mr. Wolf leads the crew again—still struggling with society and chasing the possibility of redemption—but this time, they face a new threat that turns their reputations inside out. The film commits…
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You
You Sometimes in my dreams I touch the body of another woman— not my mother, or my wife, not anyone I’ve known or seen. She’s a woman of first times and seasons natural and unnatural, who tells me ghost stories filled with un-lived truths that arise not from soil and sky, stories seen in a…