The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) The first Black FBI agent, quits when he isn’t given much to do and returns to Chicago, where’s he’s a social worker by day and by night trains local street gangs in guerrilla fighters to lead a violent rebellion. It is serious about this. #filmsky 📽️

Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) Considered one of the best Godzilla films of the 80s/90s era. This time the big guy fights a giant crazy genetically engineered plant thing that at one point looks like a rose with teeth in the middle. It’s sometimes more interested in being a spy movie. #filmsky 📽️

Rebecca (1940) Hitchcock's first American studio film and his only Best Picture winner. Joan Fontaine is a young woman who marries a super rich guy (Laurence Olivier) on vacation in Monte Carlo, only end up stuck in his giant gothic mansion with crazy servants and possibly his ex's ghost. #Filmsky 📽️

Frances Ha (2012) Noah Baumbach directs his then-wife Greta Gerwig in this black and white film about an aspiring dancer trying to get her life together in New York. It feels very much like a French New Wave film except I related much more closely to the characters. Gerwig is amazing. #filmsky 📽️

Star Trek: First Contact (1998) Pretty obviously the best of the Next Generation movies, the one where they go back in time and fight the Borg so that James Cromwell can make the first Warp flight so the Vulcans will notice Earth, with numerous classic moments. Always super fun. #Filmsky 📽️

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (1972) I picked up the Lone Wolf and Cub box set in the most recent Criterion sale and I am here for it. A ronin samurai travels the countryside with a baby, killing lots and lots of evildoers. Lots of very impressive fountains of bright red blood. #Filmsky 📽️

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) Not the first film of Hitchcock's career but the first to get him noticed in the US and the first to really feel like what we think of as a "Hitchcock film." Peter Lorre gives an all timer of a villain performance shortly after fleeing Nazi Germany. #Filmsky 📽️

The Kid Brother (1927) Another in silent star Harold Lloyd’s always fun oeuvre playing a nerdy guy with glasses who pretends to be something he’s not (in this case an Old West sheriff) in order to impress a girl. As far these things go I really enjoyed it. #filmsky 📽️

Teorema (1968) The always controversial Pier Paolo Pasolini goes maybe more abstract than usual in the possibly allegorical film about a bourgeoisie family who receives a mysterious visitor (Terence Stamp) who sleeps with all of them and then suddenly leaves them to each fall apart. #filmsky 📽️

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) A classic noir with John’s Garfield and, famously, Lana Turner, as a drifter and a married woman having an affair who decide to murder her husband. They are so bad at this it would be comical if the movie didn’t take it super seriously. #filmsky 📽️

Ex Machina (2015) A billionaire tech bro (Oscar Isaac again) brings a naive employee (Domhnall Gleeson) to his isolated bunker to serve as the human side of a Turing test for his latest invention, an AI in the form of an attractive female robot (Alicia Vikander). More relevant every year. #filmsky 📽️

The reason for the season. Happy Circulatory System Walking Through the Kitchen Day to all who observe.

Frankenstein (2025) Guillermo Del Toro's new take is far more based on the novel than any previous film version, and also makes up a bunch of stuff, but I had a lot of fun with being a big old gothic romance (in the Byronic sense). Probably closest to Crimson Peak of Del Toro's films. #Filmsky 📽️

Catwoman (2004) Back to our Terrible Movies List! Just before the modern comic book movie boom came this misbegotten movie starring Halle Berry as a version of the title character who has nothing to do with any comic. It has no idea who it's for and contains some of the worst CGI ever. #Filmsky 📽️

In a Lonely Place (1950) A sort of noir with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, that has become much more widely seen in the past couple decades, I think because it’s interested in the same stuff as people in 2025. Grahame suspects her new boyfriend is actually a psychopath. #filmsky 📽️

The Killers (1946) Based on a Hemingway story, it starts with the murder of “the Swede” (Burt Lancaster) by two professional hitmen, followed by an insurance investigator (Edmond O’Brien) trying to figure out what happened with numerous flashbacks. With Ava Gardner as a femme fatale. #filmsky 📽️

The Children of the Corn (1984) A weirdly tame 1980s horror movie about a town where the children kill all the adults in an isolated Nebraska town at the behest of some sort of spirit or god thing. Then a couple shows up. The guy never once realizes he’s in a horror movie. #filmsky 📽️

Babygirl (2024) Nicole Kidman plays a high-powered CEO with a deep-down need to be dominated in bed, and when her husband (literally Antonio Banderas) won't do it, she has a torrid affair a hot intern at her company. If this means we can do erotic thrillers again I am here for it. #Filmsky

Stories We Tell (2012) A very personal documentary from Canadian actress/director Sarah Polley, about her discovery that the man who raised her is not actually her biological father and she is the product of an affair her long-deceased mother had. #Filmsky 📽️

Babette's Feast (1987) A French refugee decides to make a fancy French meal for the bleak, ascetic Danish village where she has ended up and teaches them that God actually wants them to be happy, or something. "The food film of food films," it won the Foreign Language Oscar for its year. #Filmsky 📽️

Saturday Night (2024) It's November and we're back to our normal rotation. This movie is told almost in real time in the lead-up showing behind the scenes in the chaotic lead-up to the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975. Its not a revelation but I enjoyed it quite a bit. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #39: The Seventh Victim (1943) A very strange Val Lewton film about a cabal of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village, and also about how life is meaningless and we're all alone. The film's obvious lesbian undertones and extreme nihilism have made it a bit of a cult classic. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #38: The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) Theoretically the final entry in its money-printing horror franchise, this edition features Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga dealing with a very haunted mirror in a 1980s Pennsylvania factory town, along with their psychic adult daughter. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #37: The City of the Dead (1960) An atmospheric but otherwise very not good movie about a New England town possibly cursed by witches, from the UK but everyone’s doing spotty American accents. Christopher Lee is in exactly 2 scenes. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #36: Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979) Werner Herzog and his muse/enemy Klaus Kinski doing a vampire movie should be enough to get you in the door, and it is very Herzog while also having the exact same beats you will be familiar with if you saw the most recent version. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #35: Weapons (2025) One of the buzzier horror releases of recent months, centering around a community's reaction when a young teacher's entire classroom of students disappear from their homes in the middle of the night. Works best on a metaphorical level but that's OK maybe. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #34: Attack the Block (2011) A alternative take on the alien invasion movie in which a youth gang in a South London apartment block must protect their turf from crazy monsters coming out of falling asteroids. One of those movies that has grown in stature since its release. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #33: The Power (2021) A nurse on her first night at a London hospital during a 1970s miner's strike finds herself alone in the dark with the supernatural. Super duper tense and creepy, with many scenes mostly in the encroaching darkness. Plot-wise, it's About Trauma. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #32: Halloween II (1981) I was surprised at the extent this movie is so bad it's good while also a little being actually good. There are several truly memeworthy scenes, Michael Myers murders a bunch of hot young nurses while his doctor fires his gun at any opportunity. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #31: The Bad Seed (1956) A 50s suburban mom gradually realizes that her cute blond little girl with pigtails is a sociopathic murderer. Young Patty McDonough is a standout as sort of a proto-M3gan, who will curtsy to you one moment and burn you alive the next. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #30: Peeping Tom (1960) Was such a disaster on its release that it basically ended the career of Michael Powell, one of the great English directors, but since that time it has become kind of a seminal horror text about a serial killer who films his murders. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #29: The Mummy's Hand (1940) Billed as the sequel to the original Boris Karloff classic, it has absolutely nothing to do with that movie and instead makes up a lame mummy controlled by this priest guy who of course wants to keep the hot white lady with him forever. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #28: La Llorona (2019) Guatelaman director Jayro Bustamante uses the tools of the horror genre and the Latin American legend of the weeping woman to deal with his country's history of genocide. This likely sounds more like homework than it actually plays, it's very well done. #Filmsky 📽️

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) I think this might be the movie I would show to someone as an intro to the higher level stuff that goes in to making a movie, because it's pretty much perfect in directing, acting, music, etc. It remains seminal for me as a film fan. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #26: Your Monster (2024) I quite liked this weird little story about an aspiring Broadway actress (Melissa Barrera, who's great in this ), who gets dumped by her boyfriend, then meets the monster she used to believe was in her closet as a kid. They bang, among other things. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #25: As Boas Maneiras (2017) ("Good Manners") The only Brazilian lesbian musical werewolf romance fairy tale I think I've seen. Drastically changes in tone from moment to moment in a way I mostly liked and containing a surprisingly decent CGI werewolf. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #24: Scream (1996) A slasher movie kind of about slasher movies but also kind of a bunch of other stuff, it has a very 90s ironic detachment about itself, but still mostly works in spite of this, especially in its fascination with True Crime voyeurism. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #23: The Others (2001) An extremely effective throwback of a gothic spookfest starring Nicole Kidman as a very religious 1940s mother in Jersey (the original version) trying to protect her two photosensitive kids when new servants seem to bring weird ghost stuff with them. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #22: Green Room (2016) A punk band finds themselves having to fight their way out of a rural club run by Neo-Nazis (led by Patrick Stewart) in one of the most intense (and yes, gory) thrillers you're going to find anywhere, if you're up for it. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #21: Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964) Bette Davis doesn't just chew the furniture, she tears it apart in this Southern Gothic horror opposite Olivia de Havilland as, well, it's complicated but at one point a severed head falls out of a box and rolls down the stairs. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #20: The Gorge (2025) Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller play snipers posted to either side of a mysterious canyon who fall in love while also fighting kind of lame CGI creatures that the movie is awfully eager to show you. It just never justifies itself and is way too long. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #19: The Amazing Mr. X (1948) While it clearly doesn't aspire to be anything beyond B-movie schlock, it has a twisty script that feels like you could do more with it. A widow falls under the sway of a phony medium, who is surprised to discover her husband isn't actually dead. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #18: We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) The debut of I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun, ostensibly about a creepypasta-ish online horror game but actually about dysphoria. A lot of very slow dread and not a lot of plot, but might work if you're ok with that. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #17: King of the Zombies (1941) The Nazis (but they never say Nazis) are turning people on a Caribbean island into old-style zombie thralls and some Americans crash land and get involved. You can mix scary stuff and comedy but this movie fails badly at it. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #16: Truth or Dare (2018) It's not a great sign when I could elevator pitch a much better movie within 60 seconds upon hearing the premise of "Truth or Dare but horror movie." Basically nothing about it worked, and yet I was vaguely entertained on the plane. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #15: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) We're back after my trip to Sweden with a bunch of movies I watched on planes, including this stylish "Giallo" slasher movie from Dario Argento that helped popularize the genre. In English despite being very much an Italian movie. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #14: Somnium (2025) An interesting first feature from writer/director Racheal Cain, about a small town wannabe actress who moves to LA and gets a job at an (evil?) sleep clinic that “changes lives” through people’s dreams. It mostly works though shakily at times. #filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #13: Son of Frankenstein (1939) The mad doctor’s son inherits his father’s castle and finds the monster is still alive but controlled by a local weirdo named Ygor (Bela Lugosi!). Loads of fun but more complicated and thus less indelible than its predecessors. #filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #12: Ghostbusters (1984) Just fun to have on while I do stuff, I've seen this movie numerous times and have yet to get tired of it. The more recent entries just don't capture the same vibes for me at all, sad to say, but this is of course a favorite. #Filmsky 📽️

Horrortober #11: The Woman in the Yard (2025) Danielle Deadwyler stars in what I believe is supposed to be a meditation on grief and depression but I mostly just found to be an unpleasant experience of watching a mentally ill woman yell at her kids and also her dog which is worse. ;) #Filmsky 📽️