Everyone has met someone so full of themselves that you wish you could be there for their comeuppance and subsequent humbling.  Since this rarely happens in real life, movies like The Rule of Jenny Pen oblige us in this type of wish fulfillment.  In it, Judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush)  is exactly the kind of arrogant bastard who we can’t wait to see laid low by fate.  But, as the saying goes, even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

Based on how Heart Eyes begins, I assumed the masked killer known as “Heart Eyes” (or HE, for short) hated Valentine’s Day and was taking his anger out on anyone celebrating the holiday.  The people HE initially dispatches–an annoying couple and their engagement photographer–indicate as such.  Subsequent victims, all engaged in conspicuously lovey-dovey behavior before they were sliced and diced, also appear to prove my hypothesis.  However, as we follow the ill-timed courtship of the two lovebirds at the center of this story, I realized that the movie isn’t about homicidal anger, but love.  Serial killers just have a funny way of showing it.

Science fiction often tells us that robots want to be human.  The twist in Companion is that Iris (Sophie Thatcher), the robot at the center of this story, believed she was human right until her owner threatened to shut her off.  In an instant, she not only learns that she’s not alive, but that her boyfriend is a total creep.  Considering how humans behave towards her throughout the movie, it makes perfect sense that she embraces her robot existence in the end.  It certainly beats the vastly inferior alternative.

Instead of trying to find a new approach to the 127 year-old tale of Dracula, writer-director Robert Eggers has based his movie on director WF Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation from 1922, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.  Murnau famously altered Stoker’s story in a failed attempt to circumvent copyright protections.  What he produced was a film that is both very  similar to Dracula and while diverging from it in very distinct ways.  In using Murnau’s film as his starting point, Eggers’ reimagining of the Dracula legend is the most compelling version of the vampire I’ve seen since Coppola’s Bran Stoker’s Dracula.

Recently, someone posted a topic on Reddit titled “What is everybody’s opinion on “The Blair Witch Project”? Is it a modern-day horror classic? Is it overrated? Is it in between? How does it hold up today?”  While I did see the movie in a theater when it was first released, I can’t remember watching it since.  Given the twenty-five year time lapse, I didn’t trust that my memory of the movie would be accurate and I declined chiming in.  However, reading the comments did bring back memories of the considerable buzz the movie had in summer of 1999.

This will sound odd, but if I were in charge of The Church of Latter Day Saints, I would promote the heck out of Heretic.  Why?  Because it’s a story that depicts Mormons as being a grade above the nerds of organized religion they’re typically made out to be.  After the thorough skewering the religion received at the hands of The Book of Mormon, any positive depiction of it should be welcomed by church elders with open arms.