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 Holdovers — Nobody Comes for the Leftovers
Alexander Payne's Christmas picture is about the people the holiday forgets, and it earns every ounce of its warmth by being mean first.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
The Green Knight — Honor Is What You Do With No One Watching
David Lowery films the old poem as an ordeal: a man rides for a year toward an axe he agreed to.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
The Beast — The Catastrophe Is the Flinch
Three centuries, one woman, and the same terrible instinct: if you never feel it, it can never be taken.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Spider-Man: No Way Home — The Machine Has a Heart
The most cynical business plan in franchise history somehow produced a real movie about grief; the tears are genuine even if the till is open.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
The Banshees of Inisherin — I Just Don’t Like You No More
A man ends a friendship for no reason he can defend, and Martin McDonagh builds a civil war out of it.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Sing Sing — Redemption Is a Rehearsal Schedule
Colman Domingo leads a company of men who rebuild themselves the only way anything gets built: repetition.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★½
Lunara Film Review
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings — The Villain Problem Was Casting
Marvel finally solved its villain problem by hiring the greatest living romantic actor and letting him grieve.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Trap — The Serial Killer Remembered Snacks
Shyamalan turns a pop concert into a cage and asks why you were rooting for the animal.
Updated September 23, 2026
★★★★★
Lunara Film Review
Nope — The Sky Is Watching Back
Jordan Peele builds a summer UFO spectacular about the sin of spectacle, and has the nerve to make looking away the heroic act.
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.