Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed)

#25 in my ranking of Billy Wilder's filmography. This bothered absolutely no one but me, but back when I did the run through of Billy Wilder's movies I missed his first film, Mauvaise Graine, also known as Bad Seed. It's a minor work, made in the brief period he lived in France after he fled…

The Spiders Episode 1: The Golden Sea

#30 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. German critics were apparently dismissive of this, Fritz Lang's third feature film (and first surviving one), deriding as sensationalism and nothing more. I don't disagree, but I also don't really see much wrong with it. The narrative and thematic ambitions are modest, focused more on purely entertaining…

The Scream Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

The Scream franchise thinks it's far smarter than it actually is. The first film in the entry seemed to understand that it actually wasn't that clever, its meta elements being introduced late and almost as a joke, but the franchise became completely enthralled to its own conventions. There will never be any room for any…

Scream (2022)

#2 in my ranking of the Scream franchise. This is probably the best sequel to the original Scream, and that ends up kind of sad. The 2022 entry in the franchise is a perfectly acceptable, if unimaginative, reboot/sequel thing that balances new and legacy characters to varying degrees of success. It also seems to want…

Wes Craven: The Definitive Ranking

I was really disappointed in Wes Craven's career. I knew of the highlights before embarking on the whole journey, but I didn't expect pretty much everything outside of those highlights to be something close to dreck. What makes it most frustrating is that his earliest films, horror films made because they were the only things…