BE REEL

(Source: TMDB ) More than five months after  Guillermo del Toro’s masterful take  on Mary Shelley’s legendary Gothic novel, actress-turned-filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal (in her second directorial effort since  The Lost Daughter ) brings her own radical spin on the Frankenstein story with a period update of James Whale’s 1935 cinematic classic,  The Bride of Frankenstein , which centered around the titular creation’s own companion. Essentially a monster movie in the guise of a crime-thriller, set in 1930s Chicago,  The Bride!  stars Christian Bale as the inaugural creature a.k.a. Frank (this is the actor’s first collaboration with Gyllenhaal since  The Dark Knight ), and Jessie Buckley as a newly-dead corpse named Ida, sparked back to life as the titular spouse.  After  the first trailer  premiered, one person commented on social media that it looked like the kind of film that  Joker: Folie a Deux  should’ve been. And it should c...

(Source: IMDb )   Last spring, Ryan Coogler released his most original and ambitious film to date with the period vampire horror epic, Sinners . It was a daring and challenging combination of dynamic, powerful music/songs and supernatural elements. It was also a very bloody, hard-R story. Two months later, Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation released their own original and ambitious feature that equally emphasized the power of music against supernatural forces. Only this one was much more stylized. And PG-rated. But while Coogler’s film had more to do with retribution, I found KPop Demon Hunters to be a surprisingly resonant story. It's easy to see why it became such a fan-made phenomenon—and not just because of its cool and colorful aesthetic and vibe.  The plot combines Korean folklore and mythology with the country’s contemporary pop music scene, which sounds daring enough. Its titular trio consists of music artists who have secret lives as demon slayers, with their latest...

(Source: Hyperpix )   WRITERS NOTE: The following reviews were originally posted on September 26, 2025 ( Tron ) ; October 3, 2025 ( Tron: Legacy ) ; and October 17, 2025 ( Tron: Ares ) .   TRON  (1982)  Visual effects have reached many milestones throughout the history of cinema, dazzling moviegoers for more than a century. One of the most significant steps came in 1982, during a time when computers weren’t a general household item, while many animators feared they would lose their jobs because of it, and only a few artists and technicians saw the potential for how they could be used in filmmaking and in service to the stories they could/would tell. Writer, director, and animator Steven Lisberger developed and eventually presented the idea of a hacker, video game developer and arcade owner, who gets zapped into a computer and must escape to stop the head of a technological corporation. That became the premise of the 1982 live-action feature,  TRON , a film ...

(Source: IMDb )   One of the most famous moments in the original Scream from 1996 showcases cinephile Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) as he presents the three rules for surviving horror movies. In a similar vein, there are things that have been common in this intriguing-yet-complicated film series over the last thirty years. 1) It represents meta commentary, as well as satire, on the tropes and cliches within the genre. 2) It’s made iconic figures out of its engaging, up-and-coming cast with each respective installment. And 3) The narratives in each film (plot or not) have had at least one or more chilling, whodunit murder-mystery reveals.  That certainly was the case with the last two “re-quels” (2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI ), the former of which had series veterans Neve Campbell (as final girl Sidney Prescott), David Arquette (as officer Dewey Riley), and Courtney Cox (as reporter Gale Weathers) teaming up with a new group of young adult victims (led by Marisa Barrera a...