Film writing; Subscribe to our Substack for our bi-weekly newsletter & exclusive features: https://xitter.cf/t.co/ZJo3nOanLB
New York, NY
Joined February 2009
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The @InRO Substack is officially live! This is a labor of love by the estimable @CCassingham, so we hope you join us. Subscribe now for bi-weekly newsletters of curated writing from our amazing critics, as well as Substack-exclusive features and essays throughout the week! inreviewonline.substack.com/…
In Review Online retweeted
With the release of "The Faust Bible," this Silent Sunday I have continued my investigation into the height of the great F.W. Murnau and whether or not he was, in fact, a giant.
Read: oldfilmsflicker.substack.com…
In Review Online retweeted
Ahem: on @tender_subject, me, @ThisIsDaveMaher and @gabe_pacheco did a deep dive into Altered States. We talk about getting high, colonialism, the simian monster and the bliss of turning to sand with your lover.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
In Review Online retweeted
Wrote on Karthick Subburaj's best film - one that is rife with all his themes and aesthetics while pushing the boundaries of the masala form - for @InRO 's Tiff coverage. Replugging this for the film's netflix release.
'Karthick Subburaj’s films have been plagued by these very problems, in spite of his earnestness at confronting his cinephilia. An able genre filmmaker who began tackling social themes and subjects from his second film, Jigarthanda (2014), Subburaj has always sought to reconcile the macho forms of the films he loves — an eclectic mix which includes Tamil Masala cinema and dramas, martial arts and Spaghetti Westerns — with weighty themes of caste and patriarchal oppression that strike right at the roots of these very forms.' inreviewonline.com/2026/09/1…
In Review Online retweeted
no other director better understood the abstract/alien quality of the american west like budd boetticher, this lunar dimension later perceived by baudrillard.
'There were 230 puppets photographed on 132 sets across 2,775 shots that make up an over two-hour film, and all that thought and attention to detail translates to the screen with every textured strand of hair, stitch in a child’s knit beanie, deciduous tree leaf, granule of dirt, and owl feather. So it’s a bonus that the movie, removed entirely from its visual majesty, is also quite good.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'Karthick Subburaj’s films have been plagued by these very problems, in spite of his earnestness at confronting his cinephilia. An able genre filmmaker who began tackling social themes and subjects from his second film, Jigarthanda (2014), Subburaj has always sought to reconcile the macho forms of the films he loves — an eclectic mix which includes Tamil Masala cinema and dramas, martial arts and Spaghetti Westerns — with weighty themes of caste and patriarchal oppression that strike right at the roots of these very forms.' inreviewonline.com/2026/09/1…
'...this is still an Eleanor Coppola picture through and through. As the first pieces of text in the film assert, Eleanor shot over 80 hours of footage from the set of Marie Antoinette, only beginning to work through it with her daughter some 15 years later. Tragically, she passed away before the project was completed, but the outside intervention of family, friends, and colleagues transforms the resulting film into as much a tribute to Eleanor as it is a tribute to Sofia or Marie Antoinette.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'Clayface is doggedly determined to bend its auspicious start into the machinations of a standard-issue origin story. Plot points drift through like ticks on a punch-list: a sob story about Hagen’s childhood here, an inevitable flirtation between Hagen and Corr there. It’s especially insulting under the guise of a genre flick. That Clayface may have swerved from the movie-as-product model that’s fatigued superhero franchises for years was an interesting proposal, if not especially believable. Instead, we’re left with yet another character wrapped, shipped, and ready to appear in future installments.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'Paweł Pawlikowski, the immaculate king of grim black-and-white Eastern European cinema, has made us wait eight years for a new film. After the exquisite moral excavation of postwar Polish society in Ida and in the now-modern classic Cold War (2018), Fatherland (aka 1949) turns toward the brutal fragmentation of postwar Germany. Yet unlike the mournful romanticism of his earlier work, Pawlikowski adopts an unexpectedly comic tone and narrative compactness, arriving at a moment when his signature reflections feel especially urgent.' inreviewonline.com/2026/05/1…
'The gender roles ruling Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s Wicker are meant to be obvious — something the viewer immediately recognizes and knows as true to the world, even without the ability to discern an exact time or place. That foundation allows the real work to begin, and this sophomore feature reveals the filmmaking duo’s central preoccupation: relationships, and how they are shaped by and vulnerable to the outside world. The duo’s follow-up to 2020’s Save Yourselves! also confirms that their dark sense of humor and taste for the absurd isn’t something they’ll shy away from anytime soon. Wicker is, in a word, weird.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
In Review Online retweeted
'The idea of the “real” Elizabeth Holmes is a flag that Evans and Fielder, warring totems of professed trust and inherent skepticism, fight desperately to capture. It’s a concept of which Holmes herself is fiercely protective. She takes particular concern with a 2023 New York Times profile that, in response to Hulu’s The Dropout and a potential new biopic, quotes Holmes as saying, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Holmes insists that the quote was a fabrication, that she and Evans recorded every conversation with the Times and can prove she never said it. Both the quote and its subsequent denial could well be You Can See Everything’s thesis: Elizabeth Holmes has been rendered — both publicly and internally — an infinitely layered construction of identity, a living dialogue of performance and interpretation that’s dizzied the notion of truth into ephemera.' Christian Craig on the movie of the moment: inreviewonline.com/2026/10/1…
In Review Online retweeted
I managed to see a movie outside of a festival this month. I really dug WICKER. Like their previous film SAVE YOURSELVES!, Fischer & Wilson look at how outside noise can creep in on a relationship's vulnerabilities. Very weird movie (positive).
For @InRO: inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
In Review Online retweeted
The latest @InRO newsletter has, as usual, new reviews, interviews, and festival coverage, plus: a special announcement of new retrospective essays on the films of Lee Chang-dong. api.omarshehata.me/substack-…
'meaning in Schanelec’s cinema is less something to be decoded than something to be felt. Her images are fields of experience before they are vessels of meaning; meaning settles later, through the contact between body, time, space, sound, and memory. This sensibility was already discernible in Schanelec’s earliest films and in her place within the first generation of the Berlin School. What linked her to Christian Petzold and Thomas Arslan was less a shared style than a common suspicion of some of cinema’s most entrenched habits: explanatory psychology, guiding music, editing that organizes the spectator’s gaze in advance, images whose meaning has effectively been determined before they have even been seen. Silence, pause, omission, and distance are not ends in themselves in this cinema; they are consequences of trust in the capacities of the image.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'ideology is the backbone of cinema. Or, at least that is what Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni posited nearly 60 years ago in their joint manifesto, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” wherein the two critics brazenly wrote “every film is political.” Political, meaning a product of politics, of a political ideology, and hence, of a political system. Their words presupposed a link between apolitical and hyper-political as enmeshed, one and the same, insofar as they both reflect political ideology, but what of cinema now? What of contemporary political cinema? What of the “eat the rich” satire, which has proliferated endlessly, it seems, in the wake of Bong Joon Ho’s ultra-successful Parasite?' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'Halloween movies may be an oversaturated market, but for writer/director Ben Sottak’s feature-length debut, he’s looking to deliver a love letter to the holiday, backed with some haunting ambience and gory encounters. Small-scale, brisk, and unassuming, Hallowarrior nevertheless makes for a very satisfying watch, offering just the perfect amount of diverting entertainment for those who stumble upon in on streaming' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'director James Nunn and frequent leading man Scott Adkins are back together again with One Last Shot, the (presumably) final entry in their elaborately staged, single-take tactical action trilogy. It’s difficult to convey just how hard these guys work: this is Nunn’s sixth film in three years, while Adkins has already starred in three films this year (with two more still on the way). For all the pleasures of the DTV genre, there’s a lot of effort going on in front of and behind the camera — this is blood, sweat, and tears cinema.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'This shying away from the author’s true-to-life nastiness turns her into a kind of stock character, a curmudgeonly grandma type, and sinks any sense that the film intends to really grapple with Highsmith’s complexities. This lack of genuine darkness infects the narrative, too. Highsmith’s work is reduced to little more than big specs and social climbing. It’s an overall approach that strips the film of any real idiosyncrasy, leaving simply a genre experience in the wake, a hollow film that can only really observe, “Boy, aren’t thrillers good?” Well, unfortunately, not this one.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
