Oscars Favorite: What Makes Sinners So Scary?

On a year when the Academy’s biggest headline came from a vampire film, the awards conversation has tilted, quietly… toward fear. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners arrived as a Southern Gothic period thriller, and then marched into the 98th Academy Awards with a record 16 nominations. Those nominations touch nearly every part of the movie’s machinery, from … Read more

The Filthiest Person Alive: Taste, Power, and the Right to Be Vile in John Waters’ Golden Era

John Waters has been called the “Pope of Trash” so often that the title may feel like a substitute for true analysis of his films. It gets at something real, of course. Few directors have devoted as much energy to dog feces, sexual deviance, bad mothers, criminal behavior, religious blasphemy,