Storming the Ivory Tower

Isn't it weird how many stories lately feature villains trying to tap into alternate or simulated realities to reunite with loved ones? Let's take a tour of this multiverse full of dead relatives and what they have to say about our cultural moment.
There's a weird proliferation of media about the specific desire to travel to an alternate timeline or simulated reality to retrieve a dead loved one. Reuniting with the family whose deaths motivates Kingpin to start messing with the alternate realities...

Our culture is saturated with superhero stories, but as those stories turn towards action adventure narratives it's up to a detective story and an epic vampire horror serial to ask "just what is a hero?"
For all that superhero media dominates our cultural moment, little of it feelsinterested in heroism as a concept to interrogate....

The Auteur as a figure in entertainment is dead. Grown strong on digital production, a more artistically bankrupt creature emerges in their place. It is the Executive Auteur, and it's coming soon to a theater near you, whether you like it or not.
Scrolling twitter, avoiding thinking too hard about the deadline for this article, I come across a promotion for an AI "reshooting" technology that purports to change actors' mouth movements to fit rerecorded dialogue. It's a seller's market for such...

Happy Friday 13th! In the middle of January, we have to face the facts. Halloween indeed... ends. Send the season out at last with my top horror movies of all time.
At long last, the Ghostwatch horror marathon comes down to my top 35 films.
34. The Lost Boys (1987)...