Abby Olcese

Frankenstein. // Courtesy Netflix Guillermo del Toro knows as well as anyone that adaptation is an art unto itself. Frankenstein is his third film in a row adapting an existing work of literature that’s also been interpreted onscreen before. The anticipation that accompanies an auteur like del Toro adapting anything—whether it’s William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures...

Black Phone 2. // Courtesy Universal Pictures It’s never a great sign when a filmmaker’s sequel to their own film vibes like fan fiction. But that’s exactly the vibe of Black Phone 2 (“The” was apparently one word too many to carry over from 2022’s The Black Phone). Scott Derrickson and Robert Cargill’s movie retains the stilted, tell-don’t-show dialogue from...

Here’s the problem with reviewing movies: It’s subjective. You’re a human, reviewing a work made by other humans, and both the art itself and the processing of that art are going to be imperfect. You come to this with your own personal bugaboos, and sometimes that keeps you from being able to engage with a movie simply on the basis...

Courtesy Sony Pictures I’m not going to be trite and say there are two kinds of people in this world; there are many kinds of people in this world, obviously. Many of them are lovely. An increasingly terrifying number of them suck. For the purposes of this review, however, we’re going to sort humanity into two camps: people who like...

Kansas City Underground Film Festival returns Sept. 12-20 with weird, wild, and fascinating ultra-indies

Courtesy A24 Part of the trouble with auteur theory—the idea that a director is the primary “author” and creative force of a movie—is that (apart from the fact that many great films from great filmmakers are a collaborative process in which the director is less a composer than a conductor) the level of authorship has a tendency to go to...

Here is a selection of favorite movies from the last 25 years, as chosen by some local filmmakers, artists, programmers, and other folks.

How friendships between local talent resulted in an intertwinement of creativity in newly released American Comic.

Courtesy of Dreamworks Animation Like a lot of adults, I’ve often been guilty of scoffing at family-friendly entertainment, even though I’m well aware the genre has plenty of well-made entries that appeal across the age spectrum. For every Despicable Me sequel (how many are there now? I forget) there’s a Paddington. For every Spies in Disguise there’s a Lego Movie....

Photo by CJ Bown Sheng Wang has been doing standup comedy for a while now, but it’s only recently that his star has begun to truly rise. Fans of the podcast-turned HBO series 2 Dope Queens may remember Wang’s set from that show extolling the virtues of guacamole. His 2022 Netflix special Sheng Wang: Sweet and Juicy further capitalized on...