Matt's Movie Musings

I imagine how much you’ll enjoy DOCTOR SLEEP (2019) will rest a lot on how familiar you are, and how you feel about, Stanley Kubrick’s infamous adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, THE SHINING (1980). Personally, I am not a fan of Kubrick’s film. While I will be the first to hold it up as a marvel of production design and exalt its technical brilliance, the film itself has always left me cold. I won’t dwell too much on what I consider to be the failings of such a universally acclaimed piece of cinema but for my viewing experience, the fundamental flaw is the film’s treatment of its central characters. Kubrick’s depiction of Jack, Wendy and Danny Torrance results in, for this viewer, some of the least likeable or interesting characters in horror cinema history. Jack Nicholson is typically excellent in the lead role, but the choice to depict Jack Torrance as so thoroughly resentful of his familial obligations from the very beginning shifts a lot of the emotional weight of the film onto ...

It's that time of the year again, Halloween. Every October I enact the same ritual of watching, and rewatching, as many horror films as I possibly can before November 1st and this year I figured I'd but all that time spent to good use. So, if like me your ideal Halloween night involves getting comfy, turning out the lights and indulging in some cinematic terror, here's a few recommendations in the form of my favourite horror movies of all time... 20. TRICK R' TREAT (2007)  This is one of those films that truly fits the bill of a "cult" hit. Flying largely under the radar on it's release, this Horror anthology flick seems to be gaining more and more fans with every passing year. Approaching Halloween with a sentimentality usually reserved for Christmas movies, what this films lacks in scares it makes up for with sheer entertainment and clever storytelling. The film tells a series of seemingly isolated spooky stories that become increasingly intercon...

It's taken longer than I would have liked but I'm back with my next bout of random film musings. As I mentioned in my first post, the aim with this blog is to take a positive approach to discussing my love of film. By which I mean, only focusing my time on the films I love and while that may be an easy enough goal to state, it's actually more difficult in practise. You see it's easy to criticise something we don't like, to list all the things that made us mad or disappointed us about a film, but to break down exactly why we like a film with any degree of critical awareness I for one find much more difficult. Hence this second post arriving almost a week after I originally intended. It was easy enough to pick out the bits and pieces I liked but to try and figure out exactly why they resonated with me the way they did and form some kind of coherent essay from those thoughts took a lot more work than I was expecting. I think I felt a little more apprehensive as the sub...

It seems to me that as good a place to start this whole writing about film endeavour is with a list (because if the success of sites like Buzzfeed has taught me anything, it's that people love lists), and in the interest of starting from a place of relevancy, why not start with a list of my favourite films of 2019 (so far). The benefit of this as I see it, is to give anyone who might take the time to read these ramblings a quick and easy sense of who I am as a critic and as a movie fan. You see I was a fanatic follower of film for the first 30 years of my life before spending 5 years of my life studying the medium academically and those experiences can't help but to dictate my tastes. Yes I can appreciate a well made art house flick, but my heart will always pull me back to genre cinema and big budget spectacle and I suspect this list will provide plenty of evidence of that. It's very likely that I will attempt to write about many of these films in further detail at some po...