The Brown Note Movie Review

Director Ari Aster has had quite a wild ride. His debut, Hereditary, was one of the defining films of both horror and A24 in a decade defined by both, the followup Midsommar was derivative trite trash, with a bizarre fan-base. So seeing the tepid reviews of his most ambitious film yet, I gave 'Beau no hope - and ended up with possibly my film of the year.

The YouTube powerhouse duo release one of the IT horror movies of the year but though really good its not great. It's certainly never the level of originality, impact or quality of an A24 top tier entry. Perhaps an equal to the likes of last years Smile.

Fitting perfectly in with the post Endgame malaise of terrible failures of comic book superhero movies but with a Latino twist! Amazingly rote and unambitious stuff at this stage.

I thought the worst that could happen was a 6/10 and it couldn't physically be possible to make a worse Indi film than the Crystal Skull. I was wrong. Not only is it just a stupid and bad, it's also far more boring. For an unforgivable lack of imagination, a dullness beyond belief, the worst ever on screen use of Mad Mikkelsen, an awful Phoebe Waller-Bridge character and nearly no sequence that either sticks in the memory or justifies it being one of the most expensive films of all time - a BIG FAT ZERO OUT OF TEN.

What in tarnation is one time enfant terrible Ben Wheatley doing directing this!? (seriously, watch The Kill List or Sightseers). Happily, nearly everything is done better here than the lackluster first film, including a magnificent final third.

An entirely listenable but also slight release from the greatest electronic musician of all time.

I've featured all four of the Canadian electronic chanteuses albums on my radio show and love her style, this is another fine entry, but I definitely prefer the more upbeat, percussive tracks to the slow burn FKA Twigs adjacent/quiet storm material.

Recent reviews of the new album by acoustic-led psych folk band The Clientele and the paranoid existential post Vietnam fever dream film Jacob's Ladder, both led me back to one of my favorite albums of all time. Impossibly predicting the fall out of and come down from the summer of love, whilst in the middle of it in 1967, the LA band Love created a twitching, dread-fueled, schizophrenic masterpiece of incredible songwriting, mind-blowing arrangements, incredible lyrics and existential dread.

The longstanding UK psych-folk-indie band break out of their confines, with a hugely welcome tilt towards more experimental fare and one of the best albums of the year.

The fascinatingly diverse late director, Richard Donner, certainly created an archetype that has proven potent to this day, with his iconic first big hit. The modern wave of horror from Hereditary to Insidious to Sinister all crib from the mounting family dread over a possessed child, that admittedly is also post The Exorcist. What is often hokum wins here by playing it with a straight face, having zero fat on the screenplay and a titan like Gregory Peck at the helm. It still packs a lean punch.