Mainlining Christmas

Fair warning: this is the first installment in this franchise I've seen, so if there's context in the first movie that provides depth or meaning to its sequel, or if subsequent films build off the ideas or characters introduced here, I honestly don't give a damn. That was harsh. Let's back up. The Conjuring is a series of interconnected movies that, depending on how you define the term, may constitute a shared cinematic universe. I'm a little reluctant to use the designation, because - to my way of thinking - a shared universe is a phenomenon generated when multiple franchises share a single setting more expansive than any single component. The Conjuring movies, as I understand them, are built around the characters of Ed and Lorraine Warren, with a handful of spin-offs following associated characters (or entities, if you prefer) introduced in the core movies. Since the spin-offs are offshoots of the core franchise, this is still a contained series, at least in my op...

Introspective and slowly plotted, The Eternal Daughter is a sort of ghost story featuring very few (if any) supernatural elements. Instead, the movie employs genre elements from gothic ghost stories to explore the way we're haunted by memory and our relationship with the past and those we've known. To clarify, none of the "genre elements" are used to evoke fear: this isn't trying to frighten us, but rather pull us into an ephemeral state of being where the line between reality and imagination is blurred. Depending on whether you find yourself on this movie's wavelength, you're either going to find all this deeply moving or about as boring as a pile of rocks.  To be perfectly honest, I think my experience was a bit of both. I don't say that as criticism. The Eternal Daughter is a gorgeous, evocative film centered around two phenomenal performances, both from Tilda Swinton (more on this in a bit). I think this is a successful, artistic work that achieves...

This 2023 Canadian movie is difficult to categorize. For purposes of marketing, it appears to be getting classified as some sort of horror/comedy or comedy/thriller, but - aside from a couple brief shots that feel as if they were wedged in as an excuse to connect it to the popular horror genre - this is really more a Christmas comedic fantasy. It's admittedly in the grey area between genres, but it's closer to something like The Bishop's Wife  or even last year's Dear Santa than It's a Wonderful Knife . The nebulous genre isn't an issue; the fact it's not all that good, however, is. That's also unfortunate, because the movie has a lot of potential. The premise is bonkers in the best way possible, and there are a handful of twists and concepts that are brilliantly inspired. Sadly, the pacing is off throughout, the ending is underwhelming, and whatever lore is supposed to be underlying this fails to coalesce. In addition, the movie is light on the sort of...

Another in a shockingly long line of high quality Shudder Christmas horror flicks, Brooklyn 45's premise, structure, and setting make it a bit of an outlier. The movie is set in real time during the evening of December 27, 1945, almost entirely within the confines of a locked room in a Park Slope brownstone. The cast functionally consists of six actors, all but one of whom is over 50. The movie is extremely well researched by writer/director Ted Geoghegan, who manages to deliver something that feels grounded without relying on cliches. The characters are written and performed like people, rather than stereotypes of how we imagine 1940s military personnel to speak or behave. At the same time, you can catch flourishes in the performances and direction borrowed from 1940s melodramas, enhancing the sense you're watching a fusion of past and present. The movie plays with this idea in the opening and closing, too: it begins in black and white, looking for all the world like it was sh...

1997's second-most famous movie about a sociopathic felon (played by an iconic Hollywood star) taking control of the aircraft carrying him across the country and forcing the protagonist to fight to minimize the number of innocent victims, Turbulence has mostly (and understandably) been forgotten. But unlike Con Air, Turbulence was set on Christmas Eve (aggressively so, as we'll discuss in a bit), so that's the one we're going to be talking about. I should acknowledge comparisons to Con Air are entirely surface level: Turbulence is a relatively contained suspense movie owing as much or more to '70s disaster flicks as '80s action, while Con Air is a grandiose action/adventure that seems to wear its "Die Hard on a plane" designation like a badge of honor. Turbulence has a minimal cast and with minor alterations could probably have been made on a shoestring budget, though somehow they managed to balloon this into costing 55 million dollars (roughly 110 mil...

For those of you who have never heard of this (which I'm assuming is basically everyone), ATM is one of a large number of claustrophobic horror movies exploiting the idea that a minimal number of actors can be filmed in a single location for a hell of a lot less money than it costs to make a standard movie. In this case, the location is (spoiler alert) an ATM in an empty parking lot right before Christmas. Speaking of spoiler alerts, there's very little here to discuss that doesn't reveal crucial details about the plot and resolution, so if you're a fan of being bored out of your goddamn mind, you should probably stop reading now and endure this as it was meant to be endured. To be clear, that was not a recommendation. To be fair, there are a couple positives, starting with the opening credits. More accurately, the song playing over those credits isn't one I've heard before, which is virtually unheard of in this kind of thing. Typically they either play one of a...

I was a little surprised when I checked the date after watching Body - I'd kind of assumed it was a pandemic production due to the minimalist cast and setting. Instead, this 2015 thriller was produced with limited resources, which apparently drove the decision to pare back on elements (and presumably runtime, as this is only an hour and fifteen minutes long). The film was the debut of Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, who wrote and directed this and would go on to make several other films (most recently Novocain, which I'll have a review for later in the season). I'm not surprised they've been getting work - Body wasn't particularly well received by critics , but it's obvious Berk and Olsen are proficient filmmakers. My opinion of the film is a bit more positive than average, for what it's worth. I don't think this is some kind of hidden classic, but as a relatively straightforward Hitchcockian thriller built around three friends who find themselves in a harro...

Our rule of thumb is to consider virtually any movie set primarily at Christmas as a Christmas movie, a litmus test significantly more liberal than most. I'm sure a lot of people roll their eyes at hearing Jaws: The Revenge or Alien: Covenant described as holiday entertainment, but I'm really not trying to play with technicalities or make a joke. These movies are, in my opinion, as much about Christmas as, say, The Shop Around the Corner , and shouldn't be excluded on arbitrary decisions based on which traditions they're part of. I'm opening with this because Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film, Psycho, serves as a rare counterexample. While it's set entirely during the Christmas season (between December 11th and the 20th, to be specific), I do not seriously consider it a Christmas movie, and the reason why highlights why I consider the aforementioned rule of thumb so useful. First, let's talk a bit about the movie, which I'm kind of embarrassed to admit I ...

This is, for better or worse (mostly worse), very much a product of its time, landing around the end of the X-Files, which this borrows from heavily. Elements also feel similar to Donnie Darko, though I'm skeptical this would have had the time or inclination to replicate anything about that film, which had bombed at the box office. Of course, all of this stuff is drawing inspiration from the work of David Lynch - some editing and effects choices in The Mothman Prophecies seem to be directly referencing Twin Peaks. Oh, and it's also based on a book I haven't read. The book purports to be non-fiction, with the caveat this stuff tends to strain the definition of that categorization. This is, after all, a story about extra-dimensional aliens prophesizing future catastrophes that cannot be prevented. Whether or not you believe that's possible, I assume anyone reading this is intelligent enough to have figured out by now the media built up around it is almost universally crea...

I found the key to unraveling this bizarre religious horror/action movie buried in its Wikipedia article: prior to falling in the hands of director Peter Hyams, End of Days was apparently offered to Sam Raimi and Guillermo del Toro, either of which would most likely have turned the seemingly bonkers premise of pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger against the devil into the amusingly bonkers farce it deserved to be. But they were both busy (or perhaps uninterested), resulting in Hyams taking over the project. To his credit, Hyams proves capable of delivering a sleek, visually impressive movie. The effects are solid, including some early CG that (mostly) avoids the pitfalls of looking cheesy or dated. But none of that means much, because he doesn't seem to be in on the joke here. Despite some objectively ridiculous dialogue, names lamp-shading campy origins (for Christ's sake, there's a priest named Thomas Aquinas), and - again - Schwarzenegger blasting the devil with enough firepow...