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"The best video essay source on the web." (Roger Ebert) This web site is built on a mix of original video essays and critical, personal writing about film, TV, and their connection to broader cultural concerns. Co-founded by Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for New York Magazine, and Ken Cancelosi, it is overseen by Editor-in-Chief Max Winter.

THE REGULARS

Monthly Archives

RAISED IN FEAR: LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH and the Perils of Country Living

Blogs

Most potential viewers would expect a film made in 1971 with the title "Let’s Scare Jessica to Death" to be a teen slasher picture, but in fact, it is a subtle, moody piece of cinema that explores the fragility of the mind and the persistence of the past, achieving moments of rich psychological insight.

By Jed Mayer
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June 13, 2013 8:30 AM
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0 Comments

Blogs

The most harrowing film ever made about childhood opens with a lullaby that is anything but soothing: “The hunter in the night / Fills your childish heart with fright / Fear is only a dream / So dream, little one, dream.”

By Jed Mayer
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May 31, 2013 8:45 AM
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2 Comments

Blogs

Who Can Kill a Child (1976) is a relatively obscure Spanish horror film directed by Narcisco Ibanez Serrador, but it should be much better known, and not only by people like me, sick of having to pretend to be awed by how wonderful children are.

By Jed Mayer
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May 28, 2013 11:11 AM
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7 Comments

Blogs

You never forget the first time you fall in love, especially in the movies. My moment came when I was eight years old, at a Saturday matinee in a cramped multiplex theater. Setting my sights high, the object of my adoration was Kali, Hindu goddess of Time, Change, and Death, brought to life by the magical powers of Ray Harryhausen

By Jed Mayer
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May 10, 2013 8:40 AM
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0 Comments

Blogs

For all its originality, "Safe"'s narrative owes much to the made-for-TV movies that once permeated the airwaves, films like "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble," "The Best Little Girl in the World," and "Brian’s Song" that have been called “disease-of-the-week” movies for their morbid fascination with newsworthy illnesses.

By Jed Mayer
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April 16, 2013 8:35 AM
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1 Comment

Blogs

Poltergeist is a film about the repressed traumas and anxieties underlying the American dream.

By Jed Mayer
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April 4, 2013 12:14 PM
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0 Comments

Blogs

When Fargo was released, I felt that my home state of Minnesota had finally been given its "Oresteia," its "Njal's Saga," its "Double Indemnity." Over the ensuing years, however, the popular image created by the Coen Brothers' regional epic has been a questionable inheritance.

By Jed Mayer
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March 28, 2013 8:35 AM
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1 Comment

Blogs

Though "Mama" does not ultimately succeed as a film, it does offer a set of rich possibilities for the creation of a modern fairy tale, one that, like those told once upon a time, faces the horrors of everyday life head on, also recognizing the power of fantasy to make imaginative sense of those horrors.

By Jed Mayer
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January 21, 2013 8:30 AM
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0 Comments

Blogs

All I really need to know about fear I learned in elementary school.

By Jed Mayer
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January 17, 2013 8:55 AM
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1 Comment

Blogs

Stanley Kubrick’s "The Shining" is not generally considered a family picture, but it is certainly one of the most brutally honest films ever made about the nature of family relationships. I discovered this when seeing the film for the first time with my father when I was fourteen.