News & Movie Review

  Fear Street: 1978 (2021) It feels like we were just with the survivors of “Fear Street: 1994,” the first installment of a trilogy based on R.L. Stine’s literary series, a week ago (because we were). Beginning with a helpful “Previously on…” ahead of the Netflix ta-dum , “Fear Street: 1978” picks up immediately where the mystery of Shadyside left off before heading back 16 years before. If writer-director Leigh Janiak was indebted to the pinnacle of teen-centric late-‘90s slasher horror for “1994,” “1978” still plays in the shag-and-get-killed slasher pool, though dedicates itself more to “Friday the 13th,” “The Burning,” and “Sleepaway Camp” (even if, technically, those were in the ‘80s). While it’s hard to match the giddiness of Part One and supply enough connective tissue to justify a middle chapter, “Fear Street: 1978” still rips as a solidly fun, unapologetically stabby, and unexpectedly emotionally resonant camp slasher that bridges the trilogy’s introduction and climax. ...

False Positive (2021) With chance-taking, firmly independent distributor A24 and against-type creatives behind and in front of the camera, one knows “False Positive” can’t just be a standard-issue potboiler. Initially, with Ilana Glazer co-writing the script with director John Lee (2016's "Pee-wee's Big Holiday") and starring, the film recalls a dead-serious Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig committing to the bit in 2015’s “…from Hell” thriller “A Deadly Adoption,” which seemed like a joke on all of us but did, in fact, air on Lifetime.  As by-the-numbers as its general concept would seem, “False Positive” reveals itself to be anything but, flipping the joy of pregnancy into a woman’s paranoid nightmare, particularly when men in the medical field have a God complex. In using genre tropes to mine mommy-to-be anxiety, men controlling women’s bodies, and gaslighting, the film admirably goes to some uncomfortable places with overt shocks and disturbing insinuation. Known best...