The Moya View
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Anemone: The Flower that Opens in Grief
Daniel Day-Lewis returns in Anemone, a mournful drama about parental violence and emotional exile. Directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis, the film is visually haunting and narratively uneven. A mixed-to-positive review explores its painterly tone, fractured family dynamics, and the quiet presence of the anemone flower.
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The Lost Bus: The Road that Burned Behind Them
A mixed-to-positive review of Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus, starring Matthew McConaughey, exploring its strengths as a docudrama and its lyrical portrayal of survival, while lamenting its reluctance to confront the broader civic and corporate failures behind the Camp Fire tragedy.
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The Smashing Machine: The Ring Is Not a Home
A mixed-to-positive review of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, starring Dwayne Johnson as MMA fighter Mark Kerr. The film avoids fight-movie clichés, focusing on emotional aftermath, toxic relationships, and the loneliness of a man trying to keep violence confined to the ring.
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Aural Shelf
Aural Shelf emerged from my evolving relationship with reading as both ritual and mutation. As my eyesight weakened, I began experiencing books through audio, digital, and tactile formats simultaneously. This poem is a speculative elegy for the decay of traditional literary forms—and a celebration of their metamorphosis into hybrid experiences. It’s also a personal archive:…
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Manual for grieving a house blowing away…
Manual for Grieving a House Blowing Away…” emerged from a moment of quiet devastation—watching my home unravel not in fire or flood, but in the slow erosion of memory and ritual. I wrote it as a guide for what cannot be saved, and what must. The poem resists sentimentality and instead offers a liturgy of…
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Play Dirty: The Wreckage We Walk Through
Shane Black’s Play Dirty is a bruised, chaotic heist thriller that trades precision for personality. Mark Wahlberg stumbles through the wreckage while LaKeith Stanfield steals the show. It’s messy, funny, and unexpectedly mournful.
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Soft Closure
Soft Closure” emerged from the quiet aftermath of loss—when grief no longer demands spectacle but settles into the architecture of daily life. The poem is built around a single domestic gesture: a door closing softly. It resists sentimentality and instead leans into restraint, letting silence and echo do the emotional work. I wanted to evoke…
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Love Redacted
Love Redacted is a visual and conceptual poem that explores how intimacy survives under censorship in a totalitarian regime. Through redacted language, classified documents, and restoration files, it reveals that the true emotional weight lies not in what is written, but in what is erased. The poem invites readers to decode longing through absence, transforming…
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One Face Only
One Face Only began as a quiet refusal. I had just turned seventy and found myself staring into a mirror—not with nostalgia or regret, but with clarity. The poem resists the impulse to chase idealized versions of self. It’s about choosing one flawed reflection over a pile of broken possibilities. The cracked mirror became a…
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Leaving Vancouver
Leaving Vancouver emerged from a moment of sensory disorientation—salt, tar, and ocean air mingling with dread. I was struck by how travel, especially cruise travel, promises escape but often delivers confrontation. The poem explores the tension between ritual and unease, between what we hope to leave behind and what insists on following us. Russell’s suitcase…
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Elenor the Great: The Weight of Borrowed Memory
Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great is a bittersweet portrait of grief, loneliness, and the moral weight of borrowed memory. June Squibb delivers a quietly devastating performance in a film that explores the boundaries between homage and erasure, and the need to speak the unspeakable.
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Dead of Winter: The Ice Beneath the Ashes
Emma Thompson delivers a haunting performance in Dead of Winter, a thriller that explores aging, loneliness, and moral reckoning in a frozen landscape. Director Brian Kirk crafts a slow-burning tale of survival and sacrifice, where geniality masks evil and death becomes a form of grace.
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All of You: Love in the Age of Empirical Error
William Bridges’ All of You is a romantic sci-fi film that explores love through silence, gestures, and missed connections. Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots deliver quietly devastating performances in a story that questions the idea of soul mates and embraces the messiness of longing.
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January Dream, 1987
January Dream, 1987 emerged from a dream visitation that blurred grief with peace. My mother, who had died decades earlier, returned in the dream not to ascend, but to sign love into my palm—wordless, tactile, and precise. The poem resists sentimentality and myth, honoring ambiguity and consequence. It’s an American sonnet that turns on ethical…
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Classic Review: The Sound of Music: The Hills Are Still Alive.
A warm, admiring look at Robert Wise’s “The Sound of Music,” exploring its legacy, musical influence, and emotional power as both a family drama and wartime escape story. Compared to “West Side Story,” it shines with hope and unity.
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A Proper Fold
A Proper Fold emerged from my ongoing exploration of ritual as both inheritance and resistance. I wanted to write a poem that honored the quiet violence of conformity—how grief, gender, and legacy get folded into gesture. The speaker is a 4-F child shaped by military precision and familial duty, yet excluded from the honors that…
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Sunset Visit
“Sunset Visit” emerged during a twilight walk through a cemetery near my childhood home. I was struck not by grief, but by the contrast between the quiet of the dead and the noisy solitude each visitor carried—thoughts, regrets, memories. The poem began as a study in light and stone, but deepened into a meditation on…
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Valiant One: Through the Zone, One Stands
A mixed-to-positive review of Steve Barnett’s Valiant One, starring Chase Stokes as a reluctant leader navigating a crash site deep in North Korean territory. The film explores courage under pressure, the loneliness of command, and the quiet endurance of survival.
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Screamboat: Squeaks, Screams, and the Existential Dread of a Cartoon Corpse
A mixed-to-positive review of Screamboat, Steven LaMorte’s absurd horror-comedy starring David Howard Thornton as a homicidal mouse. The film blends Mickey Mouse parody with slasher chaos, delivering laughs, gore, and existential squeaks.
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Those Days of Paella and Football
This poem began as a memory—Saturday rituals in Little Havana with my father and his second wife, just before Miami Hurricanes games. We’d eat paella, sit in the Orange Bowl, and ride home in his light blue Mercedes. It was the only time I saw him truly happy. But the poem isn’t just about nostalgia.…
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Dangerous Animals: and the Loneliness of Being Eaten
Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals blends shark horror with serial killer absurdity, starring Hassie Harrison as a drifter caught in a maritime death cult. It’s a mixed-to-positive mess of teeth, VHS tapes, and loneliness.
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Obscene
Obscene emerged from a moment of enforced solitude in a room I did not choose but had to occupy. I tried to honor its silence, but my breath—wet, rhythmic, insistent—kept happening. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anyone’s. It was a fact, and it offended. I realized then that breath, stripped of metaphor, is a kind…
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Sister Midnight: The Monster in the Marriage
A mixed-to-positive review of Sister Midnight, a genre-defying film starring Radhika Apte that blends domestic comedy, horror, and social critique into a chaotic, unsettling, and oddly liberating portrait of a woman reclaiming her identity.
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El Yunge: A Famiy Outing- A Tale of Terror
About El Yunque I wanted to write a comic horror poem that stages ecological violence as ritual spectacle. The genesis came from imagining a family trip gone wrong—not through sentiment or tragedy, but through infestation, bureaucracy, and the refusal of metaphor. The rainforest becomes a machine of consequence, where mosquitoes chant zvuv and frogs fall…
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Him:, The Horror of Trying to Be the GOAT
HIM centers on a promising young football player (Tyriq Withers), invited to train at the isolated compound of a dynasty team’s aging QB1. The legendary quarterback (Marlon Wayans) takes his protégé on a blood-chilling journey into the inner sanctum of fame, power and pursuit of excellence at any cost.
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A Big, Bold,Beautiful, Journey: The Map Was Never the Point
Some doors bring you to your past. Some doors lead you to your future. And some doors change everything. Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell) are single strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and soon, through a surprising twist of fate, find themselves on A Big Bold Beautiful Journey — a funny,…
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Reclamation Song
Reclamation Song emerged from my refusal to inherit grief as myth. I wanted to write a poem that dismantled lineage without dramatizing it—where the speaker doesn’t mourn but revises. The tree is not metaphor; it’s archive, reliquary, and burden. Each stanza performs a gesture: excavation, disinheritance, refusal, and rebuilding. I invoked Tsi’yugunsini to align with…
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The World Will Tremble: But Not Always for the Right Reasons
The incredible, untold true story of how a group of prisoners attempt a seemingly impossible escape from the first Nazi death camp in order to provide the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust.
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The Shaker Chair
“The Shaker Chair” began as a meditation on absence—how sacred objects lose their purpose when belief erodes. I was drawn to the Shaker chair as a symbol of readiness, reverence, and silence. The poem inverts that grace, replacing angelic possibility with corporeal desecration. It’s not a condemnation—it’s a witnessing. The man who occupies the chair…
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When Fall is Coming: The Season that Won’t End
François Ozon’s “When Fall is Coming” is a slow-burning character study wrapped in seasonal dread. Anchored by Hélène Vincent’s quietly devastating performance, it explores aging, mistrust, and the ambiguity of memory with a paranoid, neurotic tone. Mixed to positive.
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When Writing Becomes too Difficult
When Writing Becomes Too Difficult was written as a counterweight to James Sacré’s vision of poetic collapse. I wasn’t interested in rebuttal—I wanted to explore what survives when language fails. The poem is built from gesture, residue, and consequence. It resists metaphor and flourish, favoring domestic precision and ethical witnessing. Its architecture enacts marginality, and…
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I Don’t Understand You: The Ethics of Pizza and Parenthood
A mixed-to-positive review of I Don’t Understand You, a dark comedy starring Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells. The film explores gay parenthood, accidental murder, and moral ambiguity with neurotic humor and unsettling consequences. While often funny and sharply acted, its ending disrupts the ethical tension it builds, leaving viewers queasy but intrigued.
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Someone Passes at 8 a.m. and the Birds Do Not Sing
This poem began as a refusal. I wanted to interrogate the cultural impulse to romanticize death—to project meaning onto birdsong, rain, and sunlight in the wake of loss. The poem dismantles these gestures, exposing how metaphor often obscures rather than reveals. It’s not an elegy. It’s a critique of elegy. The theme is not grief…
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Downtown Abbey: The Long Goodbye
DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE, the cinematic return of the global phenomenon, follows the Crawley family and their staff as they enter the 1930s. When Mary finds herself at the center of a public scandal and the family faces financial trouble, the entire household grapples with the threat of social disgrace. The Crawleys must embrace…
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Six Hours of Silence— And Then
Six Hours of Silence—And Then” emerged from a moment of quiet observation during a layover — the kind of liminal space where strangers share time without speaking. I was struck by how intimacy can flicker and vanish in seconds, how the ache of almost-connection lingers longer than we expect. The poem is built around that…
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The Long Walk: The Road That Devours Boys
From the highly anticipated adaptation of master storyteller Stephen King’s first-written novel, and Francis Lawrence, the visionary director of The Hunger Games franchise films (Catching Fire, Mockingjay – Pts. 1 & 2 , and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), comes THE LONG WALK, an intense, chilling, and emotional thriller that challenges audiences to confront…
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Sacramento: The Dirt in the Canister
Following the death of his father, energetic and free-spirited Rickey (Michael Angarano) convinces long-time friend Glenn (Michael Cera) to go on an impromptu road trip from Los Angeles to Sacramento. Frustrated by Rickey’s Peter Pan complex, Glenn is encouraged by his pregnant wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) to go on the adventure to reconnect. In the…
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Flight Track
Flight Track began as a meditation on the quiet obsession of watching a plane’s progress across a screen. I was drawn to the emotional architecture of measurement—how altitude, speed, and descent become metaphors for survival. The poem uses restraint and ritual to explore what it means to track motion without touching it, and how even…
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Shedding
Shedding began as a meditation on the rituals we inherit and the ones we invent to survive grief. I wanted to write a poem that honored the quiet choreography between father and son—the way they speak through thermostats, boiled peanuts, and Dolphins talk. The “fortune cookie” structure emerged as a way to hold fragments of…
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I Will Not Go to the Light Having Known Nothing of the Darkness
I wanted to write a poem that metabolized silence, that honored the gestures we inherit but never name. The title came first—a vow not to bypass darkness in pursuit of light. From there, each stanza became a vessel: bruised fruit, a crocheted blanket, a drawer that won’t close. I wrote it to preserve what frays.
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In My Natural Habitat
I wrote In My Natural Habitat after a moment of stillness at a crosswalk—watching a limping pigeon thread itself through traffic while someone behind me shouted to move. That tension between urgency and pause, between public gesture and private recognition, became the emotional seed of the poem. This piece explores how urban life shapes our…
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Photo Stop
This poem began as a meditation on gesture—specifically, the act of photographing something not to share, but to preserve a private emotional truth. I was thinking about how grief often manifests in small, unceremonious rituals: lifting a phone, deleting and retaking an image, placing it back in a purse chosen for protection rather than style.…
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I’ve been thinking lately-
This poem emerged from a long season of physical suffering and spiritual reckoning. I wanted to write not about Christ as symbol, but as body—torn, witnessed, and echoed in the gestures of ordinary life. The hawk, the scar, the breath—all became sites of ritual and recognition. I’m interested in how the sacred survives in silence,…
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Highest 2 Lowest: Highest 2 Lowest: From Dumbo to the Underground
When a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.
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Classic Review: Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low—The Moral Geometry of Shadows
Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low is more than a crime thriller—it’s a masterclass in moral storytelling and spatial symbolism. This essay explores how Kurosawa uses vertical space to reflect class division, ethical ambiguity, and the architecture of power. From the hilltop home of a conflicted executive to the shadowed alleys of Yokohama, the film traces…
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When the city leaves you—
When the City Leaves You is a poem about the aftermath of abandonment—personal, civic, and emotional. It unfolds in fragments, each stanza a vignette of silence, gesture, or failed connection. The speaker moves through a landscape of urban decay and quiet witnessing, encountering figures who reflect their own disorientation. The poem resists resolution, instead dignifying…
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A Working Man: Punch First, Ask About Custody Late
Levon Cade left his profession behind to work construction and be a good dad to his daughter. But when a local girl vanishes, he’s asked to return to the skills that made him a mythic figure in the shadowy world of counter-terrorism.
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Flash Flood
Flash Flood is a poem of witness—set in the Tennessee hills during a sudden flood—and traces the unraveling of lineage, memory, and land. The poem honors the quiet promise to stay, even when everything is being undone.
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The New Boy: The Light That Would Not Stay Buried
Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy opens with a wound and closes with a silence. In between, it breathes through the dust and fire of mid-1940s Australia, where the land seems to mourn the children taken from it. The film is not a history lesson—it is a reckoning. It does not explain the Stolen Generations; it…
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Still Life with Eraser
Still Life with EraserOn the news againthere is a still image—a little girl,standing outside the schoolshe will never enteragain.She is wearinga yellow dressprinted with childrenrunning through a field of lavender—one boy, in particular,has paused mid-playto gift his crusha five-thorn rose.I’ve written beforeabout other childrenwith her same sad end:ones who attendedother schoolsand never came homeon the…
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Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall:
There is a quiet ache that runs through Winter Sprung Summer or Fall, a film that moves not with urgency but with the slow pulse of memory. Directed by Tiffany Paulsen and led by Jenna Ortega’s restrained, luminous performance as Remi Aguilar, the film traces the fragile arc of a relationship born in transit and…
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The Toxic Avenger (2025): Mop, Mutation, and the Mercy of Mayhem
The mop is no longer a cleanliness tool—it’s a weapon of reckoning. In Macon Blair’s “The Toxic Avenger,” Peter Dinklage’s Winston Gooze is not a nerd, not a caricature, but a man on the edge of collapse. The film opens with a whisper of grief and ends in a scream of viscera. It’s a reimagining…
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Classic Review: The Toxic Avenger (1984): A Mop-Wielding Misfit Who Mutated Cult Cinema
In the radioactive stew of 1980s genre filmmaking, few films are as gloriously grotesque, politically irreverent, and culturally enduring as The Toxic Avenger. Released in 1984 by the renegade studio Troma Entertainment, this low-budget black comedy splatter film directed by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz didn’t just birth a mutant superhero—it birthed a movement. What…
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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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