Alise Chaffins 
I live in West Virginia, right in the heart of Appalachia. I love my state, but I don’t always love the way that the people who live here have been portrayed in the media. Poverty porn, like what was featured in both the book and the film Hillbilly Elegy, reduces the …
As a critic, I try not to pre-judge movies before I watch them, but the truth is, I watch trailers just like everyone else, and it can be challenging to avoid forming some opinions before I see the film. I went into A Man Called Otto with low expectations. I expected it …
Alise Chaffins reviews Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving. Here’s the thing about horror comedies: they are either funny or scary, never both. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that if I’m putting on a horror comedy, it’s going to lean one way or the other. Which makes sense. Both horror and comedy rely on the …
One day, I put on a pair of shoes that were too big so I could run outside to grab the mail. I snagged my big toenail in them, and it tore clean off. So I had a visceral reaction to the premise of Christos Nikou’s recent film Fingernails, which is currently streaming …
Spoiler alert: yes, the dog dies in M3GAN. That’s not the only casualty in this 2023 horror-comedy, but you can experience the rest for yourself this Halloween on Prime Video. When Cady (Violet McGraw, The Haunting of Hill House) loses her parents in a freak accident, her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams, Get Out) becomes …