Pet Sematary (2019) - Movie Review

While it didn’t get a lot of love back in the day (and judging by reactions to today’s film, that feeling persists), Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary is a fucking great horror flick and one of the better Stephen King adaptations. Having King himself penning the screenplay certainly helped, but as a look at how people react to grief and why it is vitally important to come to terms with that grief, it is a seriously intense ride, if an occasionally goofy one.

I’d argue the point in remaking the story in the first place, but considering the recent crop of King adaptations and their combined consistency, I’m not entirely against the idea. Hell, this one has an uncredited David Kajganich working on the script, and given how well he did with last year’s remake of Suspiria, this could turn out good. However, as I’m about to get into, this film ends up being a mish-mash of underperforming, overperforming and just outweirding the original and not all in good ways.

Greta (2019) - Movie Review

When crafting a story, there is always that feeling that there is more that can be done with the premise. No story is capable of exploring every single facet that it brushes against, and when dealing with something as intensive as cinema, the smaller details require as much preparation as humanly possible.

I’ve covered a few movies in the past that felt like they were trying to make statements on anything and everything connected to its core idea, but movies feeling cluttered doesn’t get a gut rejection from me as a critic. All I really ask is that, if something is going to be brought up on-screen, it should at least be given enough weight that it makes sense why it is being highlighted. For a good example of this, there’s last year’s Suspiria, which not only dealt with a whole slew of different ideas but managed to give all of them room to breathe so it all made sense. For a bad example of this, we have today’s Chloë Grace-Moretz feature.

Suburbicon (2017) - Movie Review

 

I’ve been living in suburban neighbourhoods for pretty much my entire life. The mild isolation from living in a hidden-away culdesac, the golf course next door that insisted the family wore crash helmets when in the backyard, gossiping neighbours who go to prove that there are some high school patterns that some just don’t grow out of; I’ve seen my share of suburbia. Because of this, it’s little wonder to me that seemingly-innocent neighbourhoods are so often used not to show familial connection and comfort, but creeping dread. It all looks so nice and all the neighbours seem so nice… something’s wrong, isn’t there?

 

Cynical as it is, this mindset has led to a lot of good stories, from the nostalgic reality check of Pleasantville to the unnerving voyeurism of Rear Window to the popcorn horror of Goosebumps. Today’s film, co-written by the Coen brothers and George “Hard Left Hook” Clooney, is cut from the same cloth. But how good is it in that capacity? Or any capacity?