John Semley

Recently, idling away an especially rainy Saturday in January, I found myself sinking a solid six hours into Sony Interactive Entertainment’s 2018 blockbuster game God of War: a stupid-violent farrago of Greek and Norse mythology notable for employing a fixed, ...

Uncut Gems and Dark Waters crystallize how being alive today feels.

In The Irishman, mob opulence is eclipsed by ugliness.

The un-cynical irony of Mister America and On Cinema

Held annually in a downtown L.A. convention center so massive and glassy that it served as a futurist backdrop for the 1993 sci-fi action film Demolition Man and as an intergalactic “Federal Transport Hub” in Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 space-fascism satire Starship Troopers, ...

Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (in a reportedly unanimous decision) and was (less unanimously) a finalist for the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, begins in a dead-end. The film opens in a dingy sub-basement at the ass-end of a ...

Joker and the vacuity of influence

The pathos of Tarantino’s historical interventions.