1950sGrease (1978) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A six million dollar musical that took close to four hundred million and never stopped playing. The songs are permanent, the leads are twenty-eight and twenty-three playing seventeen, and…
1960sDirty Dancing (1987) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A film about class and an illegal abortion, marketed as a summer romance. Made for five million dollars by people nobody expected anything from, and still running forty…
1980sDonnie Darko (2001) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A time loop film that works better as a portrait of adolescence than as a mechanism. Failed on release for reasons of timing, found its people on DVD,…
2010sMortal is what a superhero origin story looks like when the director comes from Norwegian horror cinema instead of from American comic book adaptation. Both films treat supernatural material as if it were happening in a country that has actual…
2010sMatt Reeves remakes Let the Right One In with care and conviction. Let Me In earns its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence.
1980sKathryn Bigelow's Near Dark strips every vampire cliche and builds a Western instead. That tension carries the picture.
2010sMichael O'Shea's grounded debut uses vampirism as a lens for trauma and isolation. Is Milo a vampire? The film never says, and the ambiguity is the point.
Book ReviewsSeven outcast kids in Derry, Maine battle a shape-shifting evil that feeds on fear and wears the face of Pennywise the clown, then reunite as adults to finish it. A rich, terrifying coming-of-age saga, held just below the top by…
Book ReviewsThe freshman year of the sensitive, traumatized Charlie, navigating friendship, first love, mental illness, and a buried past, told in letters. A tender, painfully honest portrait of adolescence that became a generational touchstone. Genuinely moving, with heavy content handled with…
Book ReviewsA transgender girl named Melissa, seen by the world as a boy named George, finds a way to be herself through a class play. Warm, accessible, and pioneering as one of the first such stories for young readers. A genuinely…
Book ReviewsA teenager's descent into schizophrenia, told through the dual reality of a boy on a ship bound for the ocean's deepest point and the same boy in a psychiatric hospital. Inspired by Shusterman's own son's illness, it renders mental illness…
Book ReviewsA beloved classic of childhood, conscience, and racial injustice in the Depression-era South, narrated by young Scout Finch and anchored by her father Atticus, one of literature's great moral figures. A masterpiece of empathy and storytelling that has shaped generations.…
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