Yes! Fumbling through the dark; ears twitching at every unidentified sound; scanning the environment for weapons, ammo, keys, exits, and most importantly, threats; hoping upon hope you’re prepared to face whatever misbegotten grotesquerie comes next in this spiraling nightmare. This movie gets it, making little reference to specific Resident Evil lore but still feeling very much like a Resident Evil game, without forgetting to be cinema in the process. And its quest-based plot is an interesting hyper-linear turn for director Zach Cregger, whose last film was anything but. I wouldn’t mind if it were just a little less jokey, and I would love to flip the ratio of practical to digital effects. But whatever, this makes two years in a row that a Cregger joint was the most fun I had at the movies.

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• Tagged: October 2026, film diary, film and television, games, review, robtober, Zach Cregger, Shinji Mikami, PFS at the Bourse, Philadelphia, PA
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Of all the villains I’ve encountered in fiction, I’m struggling to think of one more loathsome than Strangers on a Train’s Charles Bruno. I don’t feel great about it, because any mid-century, gay-coded character deserves at least some empathy, but this spoiled momma’s boy is simply the worst. I don’t begrudge the movie version’s drastic simplification of Strangers, but Robert Walker’s portrayal of Bruno is so spot-on, I kind of wish Hitchcock could have let him take it to the extremes Highsmith’s novel does. I also find it extra fascinating that Bruno presages defining aspects of two very different future Highsmith characters: the acute, forbidden, queer longing of The Price of Salt’s Therese Belivet; and the ambitious, deadly sociopathy of the Ripliad’s Tom Ripley.

• Tagged: October 2026, reading diary, books, review, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock
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• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
  Terry Gilliam, 1998, ★★★★
• Presence
  Steven Soderbergh, 2024, ★★½

💿 Added to the music library:

• Placeness Produced
  Upsammy, 2022
• Germ in a Population of Buildings
  Upsammy, 2023
• Strange Meridians
  Upsammy, 2024

• Tagged: October 2026
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Indy the dog is indeed a very good boy. But everything else about the movie is pretty meh.

• Tagged: October 2026, film diary, film and television, review, robtober, Ben Leonberg
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The many hours I spent with the first two Resident Evil games didn’t do my college GPA any favors, but the sweet spot they found between the immersive dread of a good zombie movie and the adrenaline rush of a good action/adventure game was a revelation. Two great tastes that taste great together, and they even threw in some fun puzzles while they were at it.

The series lost me when it veered into convoluted storylines and conventional third-person-shooter gameplay, and while Paul W.S. Anderson’s loose RE film adaptations have their defenders, the first two left me cold and I didn’t bother with the rest. So by the time a new RE film trailer started making the rounds in 2026, I was more than two decades removed from any interest in the franchise. But I got curious when I saw Weapons writer/director Zach Cregger’s name on the thing, and even more curious when the early reviews were positive.

So as I prepared for reentry into RE’s undead phantasmagoria, a reasonable appetizer seemed to be 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a reboot said to be more faithful to the source material than Anderson’s films. And Raccoon City is indeed careful to highlight many of the narrative particulars of the first two games, with familiar characters green-screened into meticulous recreations of some of the games’ most memorable environments. What it unfortunately leaves out is the games’ extensive variety of horrific creatures, apparently due to drastic budget cuts, and at that point, they really should have just pulled the plug.

What makes the games successful is the escalating terror of exploring vast locations with unnerving atmosphere, holding your breath with every door opened and corner turned, wondering what new mutant horror awaits. The first game in particular has a good cinematic premise, with an elite paramilitary squad lured into a secret lab as unwitting gladiators battle-testing the efficacy of a corrupt pharmaceutical company’s biological weapons. Little of that made its way into the film’s final script, and the various easter eggs referencing other moments from the games are mostly empty gestures at best, as is the wannabe John Carpenter ambience. Incredibly, even with all the best stuff missing, the film, tasked with adapting not one but two sprawling games, is still overstuffed with scenarios and characters, almost none of whom are meaningfully developed.

Cregger has shown himself capable of much better, so I don’t expect his film to be a dud like this one. His film is also reportedly unconcerned with fan service, which is fine with me. The contours don’t matter nearly as much as the feel, and I’m looking forward to seeing if he can nail the alchemy of fun, scary, and dumb that made the original Resident Evil games rightful hits.

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• Tagged: October 2026, film diary, film and television, games, review, robtober, Johannes Roberts, Zach Cregger, Shinji Mikami, Tokuro Fujiwara
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• Tagged: September 2026, listening diary, music, Fugazi, Carla dal Forno, Sade, Colin Stetson, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Thor & Friends, Upsammy, Cüneyt Sepetçi, Swiz, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Swans, Mastodon, Chat Pile, Boards of Canada, Googoosh Dolls
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• Triple Fisher: The Lethal Lolitas of Long Island
  Dan Kapelovitz, 2012, ★★★★
  PhilaMOCA, Philadelphia, PA
• Pineapple Express
  David Gordon Green, 2008, ★★

📖 Added to the reading diary:

• Little Tales of Misogyny
  Patricia Highsmith, 1975

• Tagged: September 2026
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• Tagged: September 2026, politics, film and television, dream journal, Beau Willimon, Akira Toriyama
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My long overdue first visit to Lightbox Film Center’s new location in the Bok building after UArts’s untimely demise two years ago. I’m glad Bok’s massive old high school auditorium is available to them, and if they decide someday to do less esoteric programming, the room can hold a lot of people. Hopefully those people will be prepared for some discomfort, because the uncushioned wooden seats are not great! By now it seems like a curse that follows Lightbox, as the International House seats back in the day were also pretty bad. I’ll also be interested to see how the auditorium’s cavernous acoustics fare with an English-language film. In any case, I will adjust, because Lightbox provides exactly the kind of rarefied film curation that should get me out of the house much more often than it does.

• Tagged: September 2026, film diary, film and television, review, René Laloux, Lightbox Film Center, Philadelphia, PA
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• Blitzkrieg Bops: A Brief History of Punks at War
  Alli Patton, 2024

🎬 Added to the film diary:

• Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
  Russ Meyer, 1970, ★★★★★

• Tagged: September 2026
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