Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

28 Years Later

11/2/2025

C

Directed by Danny Boyle

Starring Alfie Williams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Jodie Comer

Review by Jon Kissel

The world of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, then Weeks, and now Years, is so uniquely oppressive and unpleasant that the thought of coming back to the franchise after so much time did not fill this viewer with anticipation. Few zombie movies would be fun places to live in, but the animalistic, rabid infected of Boyle’s and writer Alex Garland’s imagining provoke the most skin-crawling sensations in the genre. Their effectiveness spurs a kill-them-all response that every critic who’s ever written thoughtfully about zombie movies would define as the exact thing someone like George Romero is trying to evoke, where the ultimate purpose is to get the viewer to consider how quickly they would shoot their neighbors in the face. With Boyle’s infected, the only correct answer is immediately.

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Sinners

8/9/2025

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A-

Directed by Ryan Coogler

Starring Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, and Hailee Steinfeld

Review by Jon Kissel

It took 12 years and 5 movies, but Ryan Coogler finally steps out of the shadow of IP for an original blockbuster with Sinners. Notwithstanding based-on-a-true-story Fruitvale Station, Coogler’s talents have been applied to legacy sequels and franchise work to oft-excellent effect. With Sinners, it feels like something that was supposed to happen years ago has finally come to pass. Coogler’s Jim Crow vampire thriller, featuring a dual-lead performance from mainstay Michael B. Jordan, has stayed in theaters for months and reaped the box office benefits. A film with that kind of longevity, especially in an environment when movies are on on-demand three weeks after debut, is an increasingly rare treat. Sinners deserves to be savored to the last drop.

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Nosferatu

4/16/2025

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B+

Directed by Robert Eggers

Starring Lily Rose-Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Willem Dafoe

Review by Jon Kissel

Whatever the opposite of presentism is, that’s how Robert Eggers makes his films. It’s a perfectly fine choice to apply the standards of today to whatever time period a film is taking place in, but it’s not for Eggers. He instead immerses himself in the norms and cosmology of his setting, with the present as some far-off place that has no bearing on the onscreen proceedings. This is irresistible for history-inclined viewers like myself, and Eggers reconstructs his direct pipeline into my brain with Nosferatu. A remake of the 1920’s classic, itself adapted from Bram Stoker, the film is drowning in period detail, era-appropriate lighting, and the ironclad beliefs of 19th century Germans. It’s their perspective which Eggers molds the film around, and that perspective is terrified of the occult, the mysterious east, and female sexuality.

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Longlegs

11/20/2024

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D+

Directed by Osgood Perkins

Starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage

Review by Jon Kissel

There’s a part in the excellent documentary Hail Satan where a member of the satirical Satanic Temple talks about the irony of the Satanic Panic, where seemingly all of American culture imagined ritualistic sexual abuse and demonic rituals in every dark basement with a heavy metal poster on the wall and Dungeons and Dragons in the cabinet, only for that same vision of sexual abuse to be later uncovered in churches perpetrated by priests and ministers. Osgood Perkins’ horror hit Longlegs wonders, what if James Dobson was right? What if Satan really was infiltrating families in the form of an effeminate metal freak, corrupting them in the service of the dark lord himself? This Robert Eggers-esque approach, where the belief system of a subculture is treated as true, utterly fails in Longlegs. It’s one thing to conjure Norse mythology or Puritan paranoia, and it’s another to plumb a phenomenon so recent, that the falsely accused continue to rot in prison.

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Seven

9/15/2023

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A-
3.67

Two detectives hunt down a serial killer who's using the seven deadly sins as an inspiration.

Directed by David Fincher
Starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Gwyneth Paltrow
Review by Jon Kissel

David Fincher’s first film, Alien3, infamously begins with all the hard sacrifice from its action crowd-pleaser predecessor up in smoke before the opening credits are finished. Ellen Ripley’s surrogate daughter and potential love interest that she’s both saved from the alien queen don’t survive a crash landing on a prison planet, and the movie continues without them. That kind of ruthlessness will be with Fincher throughout the rest of his career. As bleak as his debut is, he tops himself with his smash hit follow-up Seven, a serial killer noir that constructs the worst contemporary world possible and dares the viewer to find a glimmer of hope. Featuring career-changing performances from its main cast and a series of unforgettable images, Seven stamped Fincher as a major filmmaker, an iconoclast who rejected audience expectations and kept coming back to whatever fucked up thing popped into his head.

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28 Years Later

C

Sinners

A-

Nosferatu

B+

Longlegs

D+

Seven

A-
3.67

Authors

Categories

Archives

28 Years Later

C

Sinners

A-

Nosferatu

B+

Longlegs

D+

Seven

A-3.67

Authors

Categories

Archives

A-
3.67