Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

    Welcome back to Daily Grindhouse’s mostly-annual feature where we celebrate lots of stuff that goes overlooked by the normal-people Oscars. We like a lot of the same things they do, but we also like a whole lot of stuff that go unmentioned over there. You’ll see us mentioning…

        From 1634 to February 1637, by popular accounts, the Dutch Republic was widely in the grip of Tulip Mania. Tulip bulbs reached a point by December 1636 where they were trading at more than ten times their 1634 price a single bulb. One particular strain of…

    It’s that time of year again! It’s Bizarro* time! Here’s a ballot for those who would like to be included. This is your chance to celebrate movies you loved last year that probably won’t get much love at the “real” Oscars. Answer as much or as little as…

        I love genre cinema. I will always have a soft spot for horror, action, sci-fi, and all the subgenres that exist inside those larger categories. What I never used to feel any real connection to are those films that exist in the realm of pure sleaze….

  2024 was a good year for movies. To be honest with you, I tend to think any year is a good one for movies, if you look hard enough. 2025 is looking bleak in almost every other way, but as far as movies go, we’ve got some cool stuff…

        When I was 22 years old, I took a job at a 24-hour copy shop to work third shift, four nights a week. Monday through Thursday, my workday would start at 10pm, and run until 7:30am. The copy shop was about a mile from my home,…

    This year, January January’d harder than any January ever. While the inauguration and Trump’s first two weeks were unraveling, I found comfort in Mary Beth McAndrews’ directorial debut BYSTANDERS, penned by actor/screenwriter Jamie Alvey. It’s an empowering rape/revenge story that takes a hard left mid-way through and ends…

Women have always been a little more in touch with their feral side than most societal norms would have us believe. Despite—or perhaps because of—being shoved for decades and millennia into subservient boxes, we have never quite lost the edge. There has been a noticeable uptick of late in the…

      I’m about the biggest Steven Spielberg evangelist you’re going to find. His work, generally, has the kind of complexity and self-reflection we expect from our greatest filmmakers. Then there’s READY PLAYER ONE. It recasts the collapse of third spaces and a radically widening gap of income inequality…

Even a cursory glance at the current state of the world around us hints at a level of ruin and decay that is, in some ways, entirely unprecedented. The land is both freezing and in flames. People are finding reasons to hate each other instead of building community. Elected officials…

  The gang at Daily Grindhouse is coming at you with a medley of lists and year-end highlights for you. Let us know what you loved most throughout 2024! And expect that we’ll all be talking a lot more with you in 2025…     BEE DELORES’ 5 UNDERRATED, EXCEPTIONAL…

    It is more important now than ever to engage with and create art that challenges us. Art from and influenced by other areas and cultures, confronting subjects that make us uncomfortable and force us to consider ways of thinking that we’d never imagined previously. Writer/director Kaveh Daneshmand’s feature…

    There’s been a noticeable shift in the last year in way film depicts violence against vulnerable young women. In Pascal Plante’s RED ROOMS, no violence against women is ever directly depicted onscreen, and the audience is left to imagine the horror as the camera remains fixed on Kelly-Anne’s…

We’re at a precarious point in time right now. The world over, it feels as though several things that have been building for years upon years under the skin of society are coming to a head, for better or worse. Naturally, then, we’re seeing an uptick in art that grapples…

  Every year at year’s end, Daily Grindhouse attempts to remember the many talented and remarkable people that were lost over the past 365 days. Here you will find dozens and dozens of names and pictures of people from movies, TV, comics, comedy, sports, fine art, wrestling, books, modeling, cartooning,…

    At the end of Walter Hill’s seminal classic THE WARRIORS, Swan, played by Michael Beck, looks out into the surf and wonders aloud if it has all been worth it. I imagine that millions asked themselves the same thing when emerging from their homes after COVID lockdowns. Loved…

        Letterboxd can build some bad habits. Sure, it can be a great tool for keeping track of what you watch and your immediate thoughts and what your friends are watching, but its gamified interface prioritizes immediacy over anything else. It’s why we get so many pithy,…

  Most characters don’t make it out alive in horror movies. Some survive until the final reel if they’re lucky, while others become bodies on the slab before the titles have even run! They are sacrifices for us bloodthirsty fans, but there’s more to them than that. They have wants…

    There’s a brilliant and tragic idea in an essay by Carlee Gomes in Lo Specchio Scuro. She argues that the reason people are so precious and defensive about the the ethics of their consumption is that we have reached a point in capitalism that the only way know…

      Serial killers scare the bejeezus out of me. This has been the case ever since a probably-a-little-bit-too-young viewing of SE7EN, and has been born out time and again through adulthood, whether in reading American Psycho and 300,000,000, or in watching MAN BITES DOG and THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES, or…

        Who doesn’t love a great hero? Whether you’re an Indiana Jones fan, or one who roots for James Bond — or both, like me — those movies just wouldn’t carry the same impact if the heroes weren’t as wonderfully bold as they are. But, while these…

    With Thanksgiving ahead and the loss of genre-film titan Roger Corman not far behind us, Daily Grindhouse got together to remember Roger Corman and to give our thanks for just some of his accomplishments, which were all wonderful gifts to anyone who loves the medium of film.  …

    It feels necessary to say this up front: I’m not sure GLADIATOR II is a movie meant for me. I am a rare breed in that I’m a Roman history nerd who’s actually read the histories. I’m conversant in Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Tacitus, and Gibbon, to say nothing…

    I don’t know what you call this thing, but it isn’t “a movie.” CITIZEN KANE, that’s a movie. CASABLANCA, that’s a movie. BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, that’s a goddamned movie. This thing… This is a bukkake party of intellectual properties (IP), but that’s not a movie. Also,…