Movie Reviews
Criticism Desk
Spoiler-free criticism, full-spoiler companion files, festival finds, and the films that deserve a longer argument after the credits roll.
The archive keeps moving.
★★★
Lunara Film Review
The Social Reckoning – A Procedural Without a Pulse
Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning trades Fincher's kinetic tragedy for a dry, well-acted Facebook procedural that informs rather than shatters.
★★½
Lunara Film Review
Misty Green – The Price of Second Acts
Chris Rock's Misty Green is an ambitious, tonally fractured Hollywood satire rescued only by Rosalind Eleazar's smoldering musical defiance.
★★½
Lunara Film Review
The Uprising What Could Have Been
Paul Greengrass files a searing report from the mud of 1381, then spends his final stretch turning a real tragedy into a Robin Hood origin story.
★★★
Lunara Film Review
Hope — The First Hour Is the Movie
Na Hong-jin's first film in ten years wins its opening hour outright, then spends the rest of itself building a franchise nobody asked for.
★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Resident Evil – The Worst Night of His Life
Resident Evil - Zach Cregger trades dread for velocity, and Austin Abrams gives a video game movie the most believable panic in years. Then it goes...
Updated October 18, 2026
★★
Lunara Film Review
The Dog Stars — Going Nowhere Beautifully
Ridley Scott makes the end of the world look expensive and feel like nothing at all, and outsources the only honest emotion to a very good...
Updated September 10, 2026
★★½
Lunara Film Review
One Night Only — All Invitation, No Appetite
Two movie stars with real chemistry go looking for love inside a dystopian premise the movie never once has the nerve to interrogate at all.
Updated September 10, 2026
★★★½
Lunara Film Review
Spider-Man: Brand New Day — Never Allowed to Stay on the Block
Destin Daniel Cretton finds a real movie in Peter Parker's empty apartment, and then the franchise calendar arrives and fills every inch of it.
Updated September 10, 2026
★★★★
Lunara Film Review
The Invite — The Predators Wear Nice Sweaters
Olivia Wilde puts four very good actors in one apartment for an evening and delivers the funniest, most purely enjoyable comedy of the year.
Updated September 10, 2026
The Lunara Film Debrief
Every review ends with three more films.
Theme Echo, Counter Program, and Career Context close every Lunara Film review — the next three movies after the credits, each selected individually by me.
Fresh from the debrief of Backrooms — Mapping Is the Prison
Theme Echo
Skinamarink (2022)
Kyle Edward Ball's film proved that liminal horror could hold a feature without traditional narrative furniture; Backrooms is the studio-scale answer to the same dare. One film traps childhood in a house that will not behave. The other traps adult damage in a world that keeps producing rooms for it. Together, they show the difference between refusing explanation and nearly refusing it.
Counter Program
Cube (1997)
Vincenzo Natali's geometry-puzzle trap strips interiority down to function: bodies, rooms, rules, panic. Backrooms takes the opposite wager, making the maze less interesting as a system than as a projection of damage. Watched together, they clarify what Parsons adds to the impossible-room movie and what Natali was right to withhold.
Career Context
The Backrooms (2022)
Before expanding into a studio feature, Parsons first masterfully built this universe across his viral YouTube anthology series. It remains an essential, deeply unsettling companion piece that proves just how far his grasp of liminal dread stretches.