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
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World — Harm, Rebranded as Story
Radu Jude staples two lying centuries together, points a camera at one workday, and calls it Monday.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Flow — Survival Is a Team Sport
The world ends, the water rises, and a cat learns the only lesson that matters: share the boat.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Babylon — The Movies Were Never Respectable
Three hours of vomit, jazz, and dying stars, all of it in defense of one heretical idea: the sacred thing was built by the vulgar people.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Beau Is Afraid — The Verdict Came First
Three hours inside a guilt that predates its owner; the trial was underway before the birth.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★½
Lunara Film Review
All Quiet on the Western Front — The Uniform Outlives the Boy
Edward Berger's war film opens with laundry, and the laundry is the most frightening thing in it.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★
Lunara Film Review
Deadpool & Wolverine — A Eulogy in the Gift Shop
Two movie stars crack jokes at a funeral for twenty-five years of X-Men pictures, and the strange part is that the grief underneath is real.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★½
Lunara Film Review
Barbie — The Product That Noticed
A corporation paid for a film about the impossibility of being a product, and Greta Gerwig almost got the whole confession on tape.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★
Lunara Film Review
West Side Story — The Camera Finally Dances
Spielberg waited fifty years to move a camera through a song, and the hunger is visible in every frame.
Updated September 23, 2026
★½
Lunara Film Review
Argylle — All Tuxedo, No Motion
It shows up in a tux and forgets to dance.
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.