Nobody built the hole! The hole has been there since the world's first scream.

The Hole

(2009)

Joe Dante's that is, not Keira Knightley's. The script is a fairly basic variation on a familiar theme, but Dante brings expert craftsmanship to a low budget "family" horror film that delivers some very effective scares and creepy moments (dolls and spooky girls are fairly standard horror tropes).

I'd have liked to see this in 3D as you can see he knows what he's doing with the medium ( no throwing objects in your face hack tricks). There's less of Dante's trademark quirkiness than any film he's made since Gremlins (this is probably more along the lines of The Howling and it's his first since that film without Jerry Goldsmith), but the suburban setting is a familiar milieu for him, as is having a young cast as the leads.

And there's a small role for the great Bruce Dern and the familiar (but sadly last) cameo from an uncredited Dick Miller.

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Why would I turn into a filing cabinet?

Captain Marvel (2019)
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Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
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Triple Frontier (2019)
(SPOILERS) Triple Frontier must have seemed like a no-brainer for Netflix, even by their standards of indiscriminately greenlighting projects whenever anyone who can’t get a job at a proper studio asks. It had, after all, been a hot property – nearly a decade ago now – with Kathryn Bigelow attached as director (she retains a producing credit) and subsequently JC Chandor, who has seen it through to completion. Netflix may not have attracted quite the same level of prospective stars – Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Tom Hardy and Channing Tatum were all involved at various points – but as ever, they haven’t stinted on the production. To what end, though? Well, Bigelow’s involvement is a reliable indicator; this is a movie about very male men doing very masculine things and suffering stoically for it.

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Russian Doll Season One
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Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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