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Maitland McDonagh

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Maitland McDonagh, the former Senior Movies Editor of 온라인카지노추천 Guide, is the author of four books on film: the landmark “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento,” “Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good, the Bad and the Deviant Directors,” “The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time” and “Movie Lust.” A specialist in horror and erotica, she was inducted into the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards Hall of Fame in 2022 as “a trailblazer who makes a difference.”

Critics' Group:
,
Location:

New York, USA

Official Website:

https://maitlandonmovies.substack.com/

Reviews

Movies 온라인카지노추천 Shows
Until Dawn (2025) 51% “Sandberg ... throws in horror-movie homage after homage, so 'Until Dawn' might delight genre cognoscenti just for that. Not me, who was at best mildly amused, but others. Still, the horror is truly horrifying and the giblets ... fly with abandon. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Apr 25, 2025 Full Review Sinners (2025) 98% “[Coogler] well realizes politics isn’t something that happens off in ivory towers but insinuates itself into everyday life...[and] doesn’t need to show us Klansmen burning crosses; seeing a KKK robe and hood on a bed makes the point without pontification.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Apr 18, 2025 Full Review All the Lost Ones (2024) “Like a near-future newsreel. ... The right-wing militia led by Conrad (Devon Sawa) is on a cleansing crusade and takes no prisoners, making blatant what writer-director Alex Garland suggested in the similar scenario of 'Civil War' (2024).” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Apr 17, 2025 Full Review Drop (2025) 84% “[A] tight bit of psychological horror rooted in a too-common dilemma — the PTSD residue of domestic abuse — and a familiar but still effective trope: The wounded-but-resilient woman forced to turn full fang-and-claw mama bear when her child is in danger.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Apr 10, 2025 Full Review Hell of a Summer (2023) 52% “[While the filmmakers] do really know their summer-camp horror tropes ... I can’t say I found [it] distinctive or offering a fresh twist, other than that the characters immediately try to escape their isolated location en masse rather than sticking around” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Apr 3, 2025 Full Review Screamboat (2025) 48% “'Screamboat' is part of that peculiar trend of beloved childhood figures turned murderous fiends. ... Within this comically absurd scenario, 'Screamboat' is actually solidly entertaining — believe me, I was surprised.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Apr 2, 2025 Full Review Phenomena (1985) 74% “...pure Argento: Weird and brilliant and preposterous and yet it works.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Mar 28, 2025 Full Review Locked (2025) 65% “[A]n inventive thriller with more on its mind than thrills, turning this psychological-horror story into a Zeitgeist dialectic of class warfare in America.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Mar 20, 2025 Full Review Borderline (2025) 56% “{M]anages the no-mean-feat trick of taking a nightmare premise — an unbalanced stalker makes his way into a pop singer’s home and keeps her captive and incommunicado — and delivering a surprisingly buoyant psychological horror filled with clever twists. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Mar 13, 2025 Full Review Dinner with Leatherface (2024) “Hansen comes across as grounded and likeable person, someone who found himself in the spotlight, enjoyed the experience and its benefits and never lost sight of his fundamental self.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Mar 7, 2025 Full Review Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) 88% “[It is] 'The Wicker Man' of Italian exploitation cinema, a relentless deconstruction of fanciful urban illusions about the idyllic joy of getting back to basics: the land, the sky and country folks who haven’t been ruined by the contemporary world. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Feb 27, 2025 Full Review The Monkey (2025) 79% “Is 'The Monkey' drop-dead scary? No ... but it’s admirably creepy and never dull as it straddles, not always successfully, a tone of satiric dark humor and existential horror.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Feb 20, 2025 Full Review The Dead Thing (2024) 83% “[The horror is] in the rubber realities of its characters lives, where nothing anybody sees is anything they can trust. With a supernatural frisson, the movie seems a metaphor for the selves we put online.... [C]lever without being especially insightful.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Feb 13, 2025 Full Review Renner (2025) 42% “While 'Renner' ... isn't groundbreaking, it defied my expectations with a couple of interesting twists. I also found myself impressed by the future-is-now production design — sleek, impersonal, all hard corners and harder shadows....” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Feb 6, 2025 Full Review Heart Eyes (2025) 81% “[A] horror romantic-comedy...[i]t's not “funny, ha-ha” — it’s “cool, I get the joke, heh-heh"...[A]n efficient horror movie elevated by the Heart Eyes Killer’s menacing mask that bears adorable iconography, the dissonance reflecting the thematic push-pull” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 31, 2025 Full Review Presence (2024) 88% “The movie is far, far less about the family drama than, I’d say, about loss and coping and sometimes waking up and for one second not remembering who or where you are before your conscious mind kicks in and makes it all clear.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 24, 2025 Full Review Grafted (2024) 77% “Beneath the body-horror wetworks is a solid foundation in toxic sexual dynamics, the kind that either wear women down or temper them into razor-sharp steel.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 23, 2025 Full Review Late Night with the Devil (2023) 97% “It’s sharp little horror film, and if I look askance at all the 'best horror movie of 2024' talk, it’s only because the year isn’t even half over. ... [A] spot-on recreation of both the look and the gonzo attitude of the 1970s...[i]t's clever and it's fun” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 20, 2025 Full Review Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023) 90% “Paul and Sasha are two not-quite adults who neither click with their peers nor want to grow up to be their parents, and the film captures the sweet but not oblivious tone of [filmmaker John] Hughes at his best. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 20, 2025 Full Review A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) 86% “Some of the greatest horror in this eminently suspenseful film comes not from the sci-fi fiction of monsters but from the very visceral imagery of how what we take for granted could be gone in an instant ... either vanished for good or irrevocably changed” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 20, 2025 Full Review MaXXXine (2024) 72% “Taken together with writer-director Ti West’s two previous films — 'X' and 'Pearl' ... — 'MaXXXine' is the culmination of a blood-drenched pop-culture meditation on the complicated relationship between ambition and morality. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 20, 2025 Full Review Longlegs (2024) 86% “'Longlegs' carries a pervasive creepiness that’s not really about the story. ... Rather, it’s about an idea — an idea that there is something that everybody is afraid of.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 20, 2025 Full Review Oddity (2024) 96% “It eschews jump scares in favor of a more subtle — and harder to pull off — gradual escalation of unease and accretion of unnerving details ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 20, 2025 Full Review Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) “[I]t takes the old-school position of books like 'Lord of the Flies' (1954) that kids, especially in groups, are little savages who, without adult guidance / supervision, will do whatever it takes to get what they want, from lying to murder.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 20, 2025 Full Review Cuckoo (2024) 79% “Existing in a rubber reality where dream logic prevails ... 'Cuckoo' is handsomely photographed and well-acted, and writer-director Tilman Singer is especially evocative in [the protagonist's] increasingly fractured perception of the world around her.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 20, 2025 Full Review
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