movie-review | The Last Movie Guy

Twinless (2025): Bending Genre Clichés Through Dark Comedy

Posted on 11 Days Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

With Twinless (2025), director and screenwriter James Sweeney achieves something increasingly rare in contemporary cinema. The film develops a fresh and innovative story; its central idea provides a very distinctive starting point and confronts us with a narrative that moves confidently between drama and dark comedy. Sweeney not only stands out behind the camera but also presents strong credentials in a compelling co-starring role.

Bigger Than Life (1956): The Dark Side of the American Dream

Posted on 19 Days Ago by Hugo Pagan Soto

For Nicholas Ray, dismantling the famous “American Dream” was almost a mission. Throughout his work, the American director explored, from multiple angles, the idealized yet unrealistic conception of that utopian society. In Bigger Than Life (1956), he launches a frontal attack on the model family and on a society that suffocates the male figure, reducing him to the role of breadwinner, forced into success regardless of the consequences.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair – The Definitive Version of Tarantino’s Revenge Saga

Posted on December 9 by Hugo Pagan Soto

Kill Bill was love at first sight, quite literally. When Quentin Tarantino delivered his fourth feature film in 2003, the cinematic world was shaken. Hollywood’s l’enfant terrible did it again, this time with an epic revenge tale that had to be split in two to ensure effective commercial distribution. In 2004, Volume 2 arrived, confirming that we were witnessing one of the finest films of the 21st century.

House of Wax (1953): The Birth of a Legend

Posted on October 21 by Hugo Pagan Soto

Hollywood’s obsession with remakes is nothing new. Long before André De Toth’s House of Wax (1953), the legendary Michael Curtiz —yes, the same man behind Casablanca— had already explored this story in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). De Toth took Curtiz’s film as a foundation but had to tone down the macabre and sexual elements of the original to comply with the strict Hays Code, which governed Hollywood from the 1930s through the late sixties. Decades later, the gruesome allure of the tale would be revived once again in House of Wax (2005), directed by Spanish filmmaker Jaume Collet-Serra and starring, among others, Paris Hilton, offering a bloodier and more commercial reinterpretation of the classic horror story.

One Battle After Another (2025): An Action Epic from P. T. Anderson

Posted on October 1 by Hugo Pagan Soto

Bob is absorbed in his own world, getting high while The Battle of Algiers (1966) plays on the television. The ringing of a telephone is enough to suddenly drag him back into his past and snap him into reality. By the time we reach this moment, One Battle After Another (2025) has already infected us with its frenzy. For director Paul Thomas Anderson, this is his second time adapting a novel by Thomas Pynchon. In 2014, he adapted Inherent Vice for the screen, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the peculiar detective Doc Sportello. Now Anderson draws on Vineland, published in 1990, to create the universe of One Battle After Another.