Her REEL Review - 'Cause Girls Watch Movies, Too

Review Disclaimer: "The review is late but the thoughts are worth it, so let's get into it." (Watched & written in Jan 2026)  If you have been following horror in 2026, you have probably heard that Johannes Roberts, the director behind The Strangers: Prey at Night , has a new film out. Primate is not a film I sought out with any particular urgency. I was simply looking for something to catch at the theater, leaning further into my horror era, and figured this was as good a reason as any. I had seen maybe two trailers. That was enough. What I can tell you upfront is this: Primate is a fun moviegoing experience, but it is not a film that will ask much of you intellectually. If you go in expecting something in the vein of Get Out or Nope , you will leave disappointed. If you go in understanding that this is a creature feature paying loving homage to the horror films that came before it, you will likely walk out satisfied. The audience at my matinee showing seemed to ...

Strung (2026) Review Dir. Malcolm Lee 2/5 ⭐ I hate giving reviews like this to movies I genuinely wanted to love, but I have some real issues with this film, starting with the marketing. The trailers positioned this as a horror film, largely due to the little girl who's in the mask (it's giving Us or Them ) , but instead, the movie is more like an erotic, psychological thriller. That distinction matters, and the mismatch in expectations didn't help. Strung is a 2026 movie streaming on Peacock, directed by Malcolm Lee, who is probably most famous for his The Best Man franchise. It is a Blumhouse and Tyler Perry collaboration in production, and it was written by Alan McElroy. The film stars Chlöe Bailey as Layla, a promising young violinist who gets a job working as a musical tutor slash nanny for an affluent Black family led by matriarch Lynn Whitfield, and her cold and detached daughter, Imani, played by Anna Diop. The first scenes of the film are actually quite haunting...

Everyone is talking about A24's Backrooms, a new movie directed by Kane Parsons. If you have never heard of Kane Parsons, perhaps you have heard of Kane Pixels. That was the name the director went by on YouTube about four years ago when he released his short film Backrooms and then dived into several other shorts related to this concept of liminal spaces—spaces that exist in perhaps some parallel dimension and seem to go on forever. They are made up of things like abandoned department stores, office buildings, and warehouses that have been abandoned to time and memory, exploring the idea of what lies beneath these areas and what realms exist in our memory. He toyed with this idea four years ago and it went viral—so much so that he ended up getting a deal. There has been a whole lot of debate online as to whether or not this 20-year-old filmmaker actually directed this film. I think it revolves around the concept of whether he could really give acting direction to such acting jugge...