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.
★★★★½
Lunara Film Review
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — The Head Loses
Jane Schoenbrun's meta-slasher preaches getting out of your head and into your body, and then actually does it, with blood and real tenderness.
Updated September 10, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
The End of Oak Street — All Killer, Full Heart
David Robert Mitchell drops a whole 1982 suburb into the deep past, and the feathered dinosaurs are only the second scariest thing on Oak Street.
Updated September 13, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Watch trailerA.I. Artificial Intelligence
Steven Spielberg finishes Stanley Kubrick's orphaned fairy tale and delivers the year's most honest American film about what we owe the things we build to love…
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Watch trailerThe Odyssey — I Walked Right Back In
Nolan aimed the biggest camera on earth at the oldest story about going home -- and I walked out of the 70mm IMAX and bought a ticket to...
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★½
Lunara Film Review
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 — The Wound Under the Fur
The last MCU film made by somebody who loved the characters more than the franchise, and it is about a raccoon, and it wrecked me.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★½
Lunara Film Review
Inside Out 2 — Anxiety Is Middle Management
Pixar's sequel knows the scariest thing in a thirteen-year-old's head is the employee who never sleeps.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Decision to Leave — Surveillance Is the Love Language
Park Chan-wook's detective romance understands the terrible secret of both professions: to investigate someone and to love someone are the same activity.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★½
Lunara Film Review
Evil Does Not Exist — The Villain Is a Sentence
The scariest line of the year is "we can mitigate," said politely, by people who will be gone by February.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Furiosa — Revenge Keeps the Books
George Miller trades velocity for weight, and revenge becomes a calendar kept for fifteen years.
Updated September 23, 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.