That actually raises an important question: Does he get to keep the advance or does he have to repay it? Ordinarily the publisher can recoup the advance if it doesn't receive a manuscript it considers acceptable for publication, but I'm not sure whether "It's not acceptable because the author has become toxic" would…

For me it was less that "Her Only Living Son" felt short than that it felt small — claustrophobic and cheap and buoyed by a sort of desperate competence, like something you might see on a Canadian television series. Which would be all well and good if it were just a nice low-budget horror tale, but if you're going to…

I'd be happy to offload my unease with this particular scene onto the narrator, since he's the only other element of the film that doesn't really work for me. I do like your notion that he represents the Tom of about day 480, because that a) does make a surprising amount of sense and b) would be a dumb as shit role…

I mean, that's definitely what the scene seems to suggest, and like you say it's certainly wouldn't make this the first movie to do so, but it seems like a weird thing for the writers to just throw in randomly — especially since it runs contrary to a major theme of the film, which is that Tom's obsession with Summer…

Yeah, which is why the one sequence in the movie that I think is badly miscalculated is the cutesy montage about the "Summer effect" that accompanies her introduction to Tom. It's one thing for the film to suggest that Tom's love-at-first-sight-starved brain might imagine that Summer is this ideal romantic object, but…

Definitely disagree with the reviewer's assessment of "The Box," which to me was far and away the best of the four segments, and the only one I found genuinely scary. But I'm a gothic horror snob, so I have a soft spot for stories that plug into specific psychological anxieties — here, the particular combination of…

Certainly not, especially since the main selling point of Halpern's project was "It's more about Del's whole life, not just this one friendship in his later years." Cribbing her title seems like an attempt to stake out the "definitive portrait of a life" territory.

I was actually trying to figure out whether this was the biopic originally scripted by Charna Halpern or the one based on the book Guru, as I know that they were dueling projects for a while and I think Mike Myers bounced between them.

I haven't seen Blue Ruin, but I didn't think it was a comedy. I Don't Feel . . . definitely is, so I'm not sure how well that comparison tracks.

And who can forget his hilariously over-the-top Freudian slip when he realizes Kimble is watching his speech? "A continued dishonest . . . excuse me, honest, open joint venture."

Muñoz is Miranda's replacement on Broadway, right? He'd be stepping into the Chicago production for this hypothetical show, replacing Miguel Cervantes.

Yeah, it's almost like there's a symbiotic relationship between the 4channers and the Redditers. The Redditers seem to genuinely believe the crazy allegations they expend so much energy investigating and spreading across the Internet, but when you dig deep enough into their investigations, a key step almost always…

Yeah, but the 4chan claim doesn't make any sense. As far as I can tell, it's based solely on one of their anonymous trollbeasts boasting back in November that he made up some unspecified sex rumor about Trump and shared it with NeverTrump conservative leader Rick Wilson, who then grafted a "Russian spycraft" dimension…

I thought the implication was that he was a former member of the Pinochet regime who changed his identity to escape justice for participating in the dictator's atrocities.

Yeah, that's my age range as well, and I remember when it was dubbed "Generation Y" and considered a thing unto itself. But then I guess someone decided that we needed to conserve generations and folded us into the outer edges of the Xers and the Millennials, depending.

Well, that's one of the reasons why hopeful speculative fiction is so important, I'd argue — because it helps us imagine a way forward when everything looks bleak and terrible. Seems like that would be a more productive use of our energies than just living in a constant state of fear and mortification.

I think it's actually a more powerful indictment than that, even. The film grants the historical witch-hunters' every premise — yes, witches are real; yes, they're coming for your unbaptized babies; yes, they'll corrupt your innocent sons and daughters — but ultimately concludes that even if everything they believed…

LOL! "It's not even about the pizza place! Here's a link to an insane conspiracy theory about the pizza place!"

No, don't you understand? Trusting the word of multiple credible sources regarding Russian involvement in the hacks is crazy nuts, but believing that evil globalists use the extra secret code word "pizza" to hide the fact that they run a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria is super logical! What better place to engage in…

I always thought the better route would've been to cast someone more famous, so he'd have the same fundamental aura of celebrity as 1990s-era OJ.