Veron The Reviewer

Netflix's The Haunting Of Hill House  is a 2018 drama series, the first season of the horror anthology series known as The Haunting. Created by Mike Flanagan, it stars Michael Huisman, Carla Gugino, Elizabeth Reaser, Kate Siegel, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, and Victoria Pedretti. It centers on the Crain family: parents Hugh (Henry Thomas) and Olivia (Gugino), and the children Steven (Huisman), Shirley (Reaser), Theo (Siegel), Luke (Jackson-Cohen), and Nell (Pedretti). The story jumps between two time periods, the present, and when the children were young. Most episodes give particular focus to a member of the family, and various little hints planted in the early episodes only become important and relevant later on. The plot focuses on how the family deals with the horrors in their lives, both the memories of the terrifying events in their childhood in the House and how their childhood experiences and the resulting trauma drove them to various unhealthy behaviors and coping mechanism...

The 2018 Netflix series The Haunting Of Hill House , created by Mike Flanagan of Hush and Oculus fame, was a massive success, garnering much critical acclaim for being not just a great horror series, but a great family psychological drama, focusing on themes of loss, family and growth. It starred Henry Thomas, Carla Gugino (also in Gerald's Game , a film directed by Mike Flanagan), Kate Siegel (Mike Flanagan's wife and the lead in Hush ), Michael Huisman, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, and then-newcomer Victoria Pedretti. The performances and the writing were excellent, the scares were brilliant and chilling, the score was magnificent, and everyone (horror fan or not) should give it a watch. It's honestly superb. Its success was so great that the series was then made into an anthology series known as The Haunting , with each season having little to do with each other aside from sharing cast members. The stories would have no connection at all. Hill House was a great self-containe...

Tenet is an action science-fiction thriller, the latest film directed by acclaimed director Christopher Nolan. It stars John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, and Kenneth Branagh. Nolan staple actor Michael Caine also shows up briefly in a small but delightfully witty role. The film centers on an unnamed CIA agent (played to cold perfection by Washington) who is recruited into a secret organization to help stop an upcoming apocalyptic event. This seems like typical action-thriller fare, but leave it up to Christopher Nolan to add in a mind-numbing caveat: time inversion. It turns out that a villainous businessman (played by Branagh) has obtained bullets and items that travel backwards through time, and is attempting to assemble a weapon that could destroy the past, and the protagonist must stop him, with the help of fellow agent Neil (played by a very suave Pattinson). Over the course of the film, we see various events from different perspectives, ...

 This will be a review for The Two Popes, Phantom Thread, First They Killed My Father, and Little Women . The Two Popes  is a drama about Pope Francis and former Pope Benedict XVI, the titular two popes. The two men have very different views regarding the stance of the Church on various issues such as homosexual marriage. As the two men begin to know each other better, they each confess that they have a lot of guilt for various things that have happened in their lives, such as having failed to help their friends or having covered up terrible acts to preserve their reputation. This is definitely quite a cerebral drama dominated by talking, giving insight to the inner conflict and interpersonal conflict of the two popes, and with Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce as Francis and Benedict respectively, their charisma and screen presence alone is worth the watch. Phantom Thread is a drama, with the final role for acclaimed actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays a fashion designer who c...

Recently, I began reading some of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, namely "The Colour Out Of Space", "The Call Of Cthulhu", and "The Dunwich Horror". All three stories are rather disturbing and frightening, with their vague and often horrifying descriptions of the otherworldly creatures chilling me to the core. "The Call Of Cthulhu", widely regarded as one of Lovecraft's best works, concerns three separate incidents revolving around an ancient deity in the sea, Cthulhu, who has a cult dedicated to his revival. The statuettes of the monster and the cult's attempts to revive him, forms the centerpieces of the story. Cthulhu is only vaguely seen in the final incident, in which he is nearly accidentally woken by the crew of a passing ship, and this brief, succinct description of him and his abilities are enough to inspire a deep sense of terror. "The Dunwich Horror", another one of his most beloved stories, chronicles the strange ...

"Dark Matter", a novel with a simple yet intriguing title, focuses on parallel universes and explores the path not taken in life. The story starts off in the suburban home of Jason, a former scientist who is happy with his quiet life with his family but also often wonders about what his life could have been like if he had continued his gruelling research. He gets his answer when a man in a mask abducts and drugs him. When he wakes up, he is revealed to have been missing for weeks, but when he realizes that the people keeping him in a lab have their own ulterior motives, he breaks out, and enters a confusing world in which he never married, but has obtained astounding success in his pursuit of science, culminating in his invention of a mysterious box that can allow access to alternate universes. He eventually realizes that the Jason of this world was the person who abducted him, so he could get a chance at living his life as a happily married man with a loving family. And so...

Having always had a love of films, and action films in particular, I decided to watch Mission: Impossible - Fallout,  which is touted as one of the best action films of the decade. I'm happy to say, it did not disappoint at all.  The film starts with a mission to recover missing plutonium that can be used to make highly-destructive bombs, but the mission quickly goes awry, and what follows is an hunt for  the plutonium and the masterminds who plan to use it for a devious plot to threaten the world. The film can be considered the epitome of the summer blockbuster action film, executed near-perfectly. The action is thrilling and relentless from start to finish, the film is tightly plotted (all the more impressive considering they only had a rough 30-page outline when they began to shoot the film), with many surprising twists and turns, and the dialogue is brilliant, focusing on meaningful character interactions, most of which build off of the events and character beats of...