Boyd Petrie

(Alpha 21 release, PC version) Ridiculously addictive thanks to the building and crafting systems, this game gives an excellent balance of danger and excitement. As the title suggests, with default settings, every 7 days a blood moon rises and horde night begins. The zombies become feral and aggressive, attacking you no matter where you are. You can batten down the hatches and try to survive, but the only real option is to build up a defensive position and kill waves of zombies for 6 in-game hours. This ever-present doomsday clock means you inevitably have to build for these horde nights or be savagely eaten by the zombies. This is a fairly well-built survival game -- you have to find water, cook food, gather materials and build new items. The Fun Pimps have really done a good job at creating a feeling of isolation. You really do feel like you are on your own. Traders around various towns do help break things up, allowing you to purchase food, weapons, ammo, and other items to help you survive. There is no story here, no end game. Just a continuous survivalism streak as the in-game days pass. The zombies have an interesting AI pattern that can be gamed, and at a certain point in your level progression, you become nearly impossible to kill. I have started over from scratch a few times just to re-live the beginning stages of the gameplay. Some issues with the game do exist, and it seems fairly resource intensive for what seems to be a graphically modest production. These are not Baldur's Gate level graphics, but they are still effective. You can find yourself dead through various glitches or frame rate drops, and there's no real save point system. Multiplayer is particularly fun when you have friends who jump into your game. One person hosts the game, acting like a server, and everyone else joins. This can be a problem when trying to get all friends together at once, but there are also a lot of servers that are just constantly running and anyone can just jump in to battle zombies. Overall, while it's not the best game in the world, it certainly is one of the more entertaining games I've played in recent years. And with the first actual release on the horizon, it should be interesting to see what The Fun Pimps do with this now that they've officially released it.

Creepy and occasionally disturbing, reminded me of Shyamalan's "The Village" if it wasn't terrible. Acting and production design are all very good, although the scenes are definitely underlit (we had to turn up the brightness on our OLED to compensate). The prologue seems to open with a bang, then flashes back 35 years to the child version of the woman in the prologue. I kept expecting it to loop back to the prologue scenes, but that never happens. This ultimately leaves the story feeling incomplete. The editing could use some tightening because all the elements are here for an effective horror film, but ultimately it just feels underwhelming. Not as scary as it should be, but it does have some fairly gruesome scenes that are not for the squeamish.

Simplifying race relations to nearly an offensive degree, Crash is meant to appeal to white viewers who want to feel like their "white savior complex" is not problematic. The most offensive part involves a white police officer sexually assaulting a black woman and then getting a redemption arc at the end as he saves her life (see? it was all worth it, and he's not really a bad person). The acting is fairly top-notch, but it's all in service to a script that consistently undermines their work. It wants desperately to be a complex view of people who may just be a bit racist, but are just dealing with their own demons and problems. Even the charismatic Michael Peña and his adorable relationship with his daughter is played for a soap opera-level dramatic moment when her invisible cloak saves his life from blank bullets. It's rather embarrassing that this won Best Picture at the Oscars, but it is not a movie that holds up very well, especially in today's social media-saturated culture.

**Seen in theaters at full price** Violent and gory brutality is surprisingly the best thing about this otherwise dreadful "filler episode" of a Halloween trilogy. Nothing is resolved, and the screenwriters attempt to play up a "Unite the Right" Charlottesville analogy, warning about the dangers of mob mentality. But it is all rather stupid here, in large part due to incredibly dumb characters (moreso than usual for a slasher movie). Bad writing, dialogue, directing, and editing all culminate in a trashy waste of time. While the 2018 is no classic, it was a good re-entry into the series, sort of skipping past all the other Halloweens and returning as a sort-of-direct sequel to the 1978 John Carpenter classic. Due to that ret-conning, this new Halloween Kills makes almost no sense. Since apparently Myers has been institutionalized for the past 40 years, why are all the citizens of Haddonfield so up in arms about his return? It requires an acknowledgement of the various Halloween iterations while also ignoring they exist. The editing is especially awful, jumping without reason between scenes that seem to have no reason for existing. Characters are just introduced haphazardly only to be killed off in a gruesome over-the-top fashion. The gore effects, however, are top-notch and may be about the only saving grace for this otherwise absurd Halloween sequel. There isn't much to be scared of here, and the shoddy filmmaking is evidenced throughout (even going so far as to leave a B-roll camera operator readily visible during a crowd scene at the hospital--oops). Hopefully "Halloween Ends" will be a good conclusion, but as a middle entry, this film sucks the life out of the series that was generated by the 2018 movie.

Not quite the masterpiece that the 1992 Bernard Rose horror film by the same name, but far away superior to the two previous sequels, this Candyman smartly focuses on its black cast with black artists producing it. It's not as scary as the original, but it's gorier and includes body horror elements that are not for the squeamish. The biggest hindrance here is the lack of Candyman (or Tony Todd) as a presence. He's discussed, and there's a foreboding sense of dread, but the actual murders occur using visual effects as Candyman attacks only in reflections (with real-life results). It feels more gimmicky and less frightening as people are gutted by an unforeseen assailant. The cast is good, and the directing is assured with some beautiful cinematography and stunning shadow puppetry. Overall, a worthwhile horror movie that focuses on the racial, class, and social issues that Candyman has always had as its foundation.

This is a relatively well made coming-of-age story as an 11 year old Senegalese-French girl navigates her conservative religious upbringing which conflicts with the social medial narrative she sees presented daily on YouTube, Instagram, etc. It's sometimes uncomfortable, and I do question the filmmaker's decision to showcase twerk dancing by minors, but the controversy is also blown out of proportion. There is nothing explicit here, most of it is suggestive. The biggest problem I had is the lensing choices, focusing up-close on the actors as they dance, which lends credibility to the complaints of exploitation. Unfortunately, people (particularly in America) want to imagine kids are innocent angels who would never do anything like what they see here, but it happens all the time, and sweeping it under the rug and turning a blind eye is a disservice to young people everywhere who need to have frank discussions with their parents over appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. Hopefully at the very least this movie's controversy will create these types of conversations between parents and their adolescent children. The acting is top-notch, the first-time filmmaker Doucoure punctuates scenes with surrealistic flourishes (such as when Amy suddenly seems to ascend into the heavens or her dresses start bleeding). What we see here is a brief snapshot of a young girl's life as she starts encountering puberty, a rarity for any movie these days (movies about male puberty, on the other hand, are numerous). The dialogue is natural and I appreciate the focus from Amy's perspective, such as when she listens to her mother's conversations as she attempts to spin her husband's decision to take on a second wife. This is a difficult age to depict on film, because of the issues they face as they start to encounter adult material without understanding the context of why it is adult material. In conservative cultures especially, these adult behaviors are entirely hidden from view and never discussed. These kids will frequently turn to other sources, and social media is currently the biggest player in affecting our youth's behavior and maturation. Cuties ("Mignonnes") is overall a good movie which doesn't quite achieve the result it strives for. While it attempts to warn of the dangers of social medial and its impact on children, it doesn't succeed as well as when it just shows the young actors interacting in school and with those around them. The dance segments are filmed to mirror what is shown on MTV, and this doesn't work, bordering on exploitation of the very actors themselves. It's a very thin line and the film doesn't always succeed.

One of the best films Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet have ever done, and of course Charlie Kaufman won a well-deserved Oscar for his brilliant screenplay. This crazy romantic comedy jumps through various times of a tumultuous relationship, but not in the way you initially think. Great directing and subtle visual effects help the viewer understand this slightly sci-fi story of two people destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Superb!!

Moulin Rouge! followed Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" which is, to date, the only movie I've ever walked out of during a theatrical run. So I had very low expectations of Moulin Rouge! as a result. And what I got was one of the best movie musicals in decades, high energy and over-the-top romance in a glossy, MTV-type package. Nicole Kidman grounds the film with a wonderful performance. Ewan McGregor is spectacular (spectacular!) with a soaring singing voice that I had no reason to expect from him. The pop songs are re-packaged and mashed into medleys, from Madonna to Queen to Jose Feliciano to The Sound of Music, the different music pieces are combined into lovely and emotion-filled numbers. One of the best movies from 2001, with one of the best soundtracks ever released.