Her REEL Review - 'Cause Girls Watch Movies, Too

I promised myself I would not do it again. And then, because I love Black people and I want to see Black people win, I did it again. I watched a Tyler Perry film. So here we are. If you are unfamiliar with Tyler Perry, the short version is this: he got his start on the church play circuit in the late 1990s and early 2000s, building an audience out of working-class Black churchgoers who finally felt seen on a stage. I watched nearly every one of those plays in college. My church community gathered around them the way other communities gather around sporting events. There was solidarity in it. When Perry eventually made his transition to cinema, a lot of us were genuinely rooting for him, because he was the rare example of someone who had built something entirely from nothing, sleeping in his car, educating himself, pulling himself up without a roadmap. That goodwill has been wearing thin for a while now, but it has not entirely evaporated, which is probably why I keep coming back. Jo...

I have a confession to make: this is the movie that kicked off my I Love Horror challenge , and it took me a decade to get here. Crimson Peak came out in 2015, and I missed it entirely, because at the time I was still nursing a self-imposed horror ban after Eli Roth's Hostel left me traumatized in a way I clearly hadn't recovered from. It took a full-blown challenge, and a genuine love for Guillermo del Toro, to finally get me into this house. Directed by del Toro, whose Pan's Labyrinth sits comfortably in my top 100 films of all time, Crimson Peak follows Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), an aspiring writer with a taste for ghost stories, who falls for Sir Thomas Sharp (Tom Hiddleston), a charming but cash-strapped baronet trying to secure investors to unearth the red clay beneath his crumbling family estate. Edith marries him, leaves her father and her other suitor, Dr. McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), behind, and moves into Allerdale Hall: a house that is, quite literally, f...

I have a bone to pick with all of you. Somehow you let me go this long without watching The Black Phone , and I am genuinely disappointed in us both. But here we are, and I have since corrected that mistake, so let's get into it. I finally sat down with this one on a day off while nursing a sick kid, which tells you everything about my current season of life. What I expected was something I would have to turn off halfway through. What I got was one of the more quietly affecting horror films I have seen in a long time. Directed by Scott Derrickson and based on a short story by Joe Hill, The Black Phone follows Finney Blake, a young boy growing up in a small town already weighed down by bullying, an alcoholic and abusive father, and the grief of losing his mother. The town itself is living under a shadow: a child serial killer known as the Grabber has been snatching kids, and Finney eventually becomes one of his victims. What unfolds from there is part supernatural thriller, part...