ROBOT DREAMS is a lovely and lyrical 2023 animated film from Spain. It has no dialogue, but English signage because it’s set in New York City. It’s some time in the ‘80s and there are no humans, only animals living like humans (in apartments, wearing clothes, having jobs). Nothing too deep, just a cartooning conceit we can easily accept, with the occasional joke like when the main character Dog is reading Pet Sematary and we have to wonder what the hell that book is in this world. The animals seem to have achieved all the same things as human civilization: the Twin Towers, pizza delivery, ALF, “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire, you name it.
Dog lives alone in an apartment in the East Village. He’s lonely and bored of playing Pong by himself and sees an ad on late night TV about ordering a robot friend. It arrives in the mail and he builds it and they walk around holding hands and having a great time together all summer. Robot is very friendly and open to learning – he waves back at a baby, flips off back at some punk rockers, does his best to join in. (read the rest of this shit…)
After seeing 
If Stephen Norrington had only ever been a special effects guy he still would’ve made a mark. He worked under Dick Smith, Rick Baker, Stan Winston and Jim Henson. He did the Grand High Witch makeup in THE WITCHES, and designed creatures for Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. He played the Gump in 
THE WILD ROBOT is this year’s feature from DreamWorks Animation, and I’m not sure I would’ve guessed that without the logo. It’s a funny movie but not a smart alecky one, not a child of SHREK. Based on a 2016 young readers book by Peter Brown (first in a trilogy), it’s a simple, sweet tale with an elegant premise: a shipment of mass-manufactured helper robots crashes in the wilderness, one of them survives, accidentally imprints on an orphaned gosling runt and, since her programming requires her to complete all tasks, she becomes convinced that she must teach the goose to swim and fly before migration time in the winter. So there’s a goal to work toward and an inevitable sadness if it’s ever achieved. Good drama. 
Unless I’m forgetting something, Clint Eastwood only has two movies that could be classified as spy movies, and both involve a mission to a mountain in the Alps. One is 
102 years after F.W. Murnau’s illegal copyright violation classic, here’s writer/director Robert Eggers following up 
I’m not fully acquainted with the filmography of John Sayles, but I’m pretty sure THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET is an outlier. It was 1984, so Sayles had already had his Roger Corman/exploitation beginnings (writing PIRANHA, 
RED ONE is not a prequel to THE BIG RED ONE or 
Like all modern horror movies, CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS – a 2024 indie that came to Shudder on the 15th – is about a true crime podcaster who experienced trauma. But it does not feel like it’s trying to be “about trauma,” and the true crime aspect works because the protagonist, Lola Darling (Jeremy Moineau) is treated as a straight up detective character like Nancy Drew, Jessica Fletcher or somebody there’d be a BBC mystery series about. She’s very self-possessed, observant and knowledgeable, has an interest in the morbid, sneaks around crime scenes with a flash light, brings her own latex gloves.
If you knew there was a new Hellboy movie this year – the fourth live action one – chances are you weren’t thrilled about that fact. For most people, it seems, 
