As with “Buffy” Season 9, “Angel & Faith” Season 9 gets off to a great start from the pen of a rookie Buffyverse writer. Christos Gage, who will go on to be the most ubiquitous of the canonical Dark Horse comics scribes, has a good grasp of the relationship between Angel and Faith. He invents […]
Mamet Monday (Movie review): The film features gorgeous settings and strong acting, and keeps you guessing.
Yvonne Navarro expands on the Dark Willow period of Season 6 in her “Wicked Willow” trilogy by asking “What if Willow had been evil for a longer time period?” Evil Willow is a short-lived but iconic villain in Buffyverse lore, and this alternate-reality trilogy is a way to spend more time with her, since in […]
“Summer ’03” (2018) had the misfortune of coming out the same year as “Eighth Grade,” which showed new blood can be wrung from the stone of coming-of-age dramedies. Stacked against other entries in the genre – but especially that one – “Summer ’03” is tame, without a sharp or original perspective. The trappings of a […]
Throwback Thursday (Movie review): Before “I Am the Night,” a 2006 film explored the Black Dahlia case with a different tone.
In 2008 when the “Buffy” book line was canceled, author Yvonne Navarro lamented to SlayerLit: “Dangling out there is a golden opportunity based on the final show in the series … an unlimited number of tales about Slayers from all over the world, doing what they do best in their own environment but under the […]
Writer Andrew Chambliss and artist Georges Jeanty stick the landing to conclude the character-driven yet suitably epic “Buffy” Season 9 with the five-issue “The Core.” It’s a crying shame that this marks Chambliss’ finale in the Buffyverse. He gets the saga back on track after the uneven Season 8 and keeps threads percolating for Season […]
Mamet Monday (Movie review): This crime thriller has Mamet’s usual intricate plotting plus great characters.
In the tradition of great Asian cinema, “Burning” (2018) is intensely strange and immensely engrossing. Fittingly, lead actor Ah-in Yoo, as Lee Jong-su, seems to barely be giving a performance, but we’re right there with him as his life gets weirder and weirder.
When I throw around the phrase “makeshift family” in reviews, I’m usually talking about tight groups of friends. But the Japanese film “Shoplifters” (2018) shows us a more literal makeshift family. It’s about six societal castoffs who live together in a tiny house owned by the woman they call “Grandma” (Kirin Kiki).