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Reviews & Commentary by Adam Groves
A VERY NUTTY CHRISTMAS
One of the weirder Lifetime movies I’ve seen, offering a cockeyed inversion of THE NUTCRACKER and a message that fully lives up to the “nutty” designation: that true holiday cheer is possible only through the intercession of a doll in human form
MERRY CHRISTMAS
A Bollywood Christmas movie with everything you’d expect
STAND BY ME
In remembering the recently deceased Rob Reiner, I’ll be taking the good with the bad. Here’s the good…
NORTH
…and here’s the (very) bad.
REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND
A lesser film by Belgium’s Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, who specialize in uniquely tripped-out takes on European genre cinema from years past
HUMANIMALITY
A self-proclaimed “hybrid monster of a book that interrogates humanity’s troubled relationship with its animality, & so its relation to animals, the earth, and ultimately the cosmos”
SNAIL
I don’t know what kind of drugs Richard Miller was on when he wrote this novel, but I want some
NOCTURNAL APPARITIONS: ESSENTIAL STORIES
A newly translated assortment of “Essential Stories” by Poland’s Bruno Schulz
BURNT OFFERINGS
Potent but overrated haunted house scares from the 1970s
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVES
A deliberately overwrought Frenchified attempt at American noir fiction, with some mighty saucy passages
BEER, BLOOD AND ASHES
In remembrance of actor Michael Madsen, who died on July 3, 2025, here’s a look at his first book of poetry
WHO KNEW
A gossipy memoir by one of the main architects of the movie apocalypse that occurred in the late 1970s and early 80s
THE BRADBURY CHRONICLES
The first major biography of the late Ray Bradbury and, I’m pleased to report, a good one
ART! TRASH! TERROR! ADVENTURES IN STRANGE CINEMA
Quite simply, if you’re a horror fan this book, which collects several decades’ worth of reviews of “movies that refuse to behave,” is a must read
THE KILLING OF THE UNICORN: DOROTHY STRATTEN 1960-1980
A grief-fueled remembrance of the late Dorothy Stratten by “the director who loved her.”
HELL HOUSE LLC, Critics and Creative Campaigns
All about the recent furor over the marketing of HELL HOUSE LLC: LINEAGE, with info on Tom Laughlin, David Lynch and James Cameron
Terence Stamp: 1938-2025
There was nobody else quite like the recently deceased Terence Stamp
R. I. P. Howard Stern
No, Howard Stern is not dead, but he might as well be
WHORE vs. SHOWGIRLS
Here’s a pairing that hasn’t been made too often, but it’s a valid one: WHORE, a low budgeter from 1991, and SHOWGIRLS, an expensive tentpole release from 1995
Nepo Babies Circa 2025
Yes, the spread of Hollywood nepotism is a glaring issue, but it’s one that, for the moment at least, does appear to be improving