That's Entertainment: Stopmotion (Robert Morgan, 2023)

One of the benefits of living with someone is that you get to know all of their various Bits and Guys; the little jokes and funny voices that inhabit them like a host of demons just waiting to come out. For some time now, my husband’s most frequent Guy has been Film Critic Guy, a guy who sounds like a mediocre film critic. 

Film Critic Guy has many distinctive qualities — for example, he says he is “something of a cinephile” a lot. He refers to movies as “pictures” or “films;” he never calls them “movies.” One of his most important traits, though, is that if he doesn’t know what a movie is about, or doesn’t have anything to say about it, Film Critic Guy will describe it as “a love letter to the cinema.”

Mank? A love letter to the cinema. Cronenberg’s Crash? A love letter to the cinema. Eraserhead? A love letter to the cinema. The Jackass franchise? Well, you might say it’s something of a love letter to the cinema!

I don’t know why this is so funny to me. It just sounds like something a particularly boring critic would say. It sounds like what you imagine Academy Award voters saying to each other as they vote, once again, to give a Best Picture Oscar to a movie about how movies are the most important and wonderful movies in the whole movie-watching world. 

Which is all to say: Stopmotion is one of my favorite horror movies of the past year. Normally, when I recommend a movie, I try to tie it into some kind of wider social or political context; I want to explain, not just why you’d want to watch the movie, but why you’d want to watch it right now. So, what is Stopmotion about? Well: It’s something of a love letter to the cinema. The stop-motion animated parts, at least.