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Maitland McDonagh

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

Maitland McDonagh, the former Senior Movies Editor of TV 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.”

Location:

New York, USA

Official Website:

https://maitlandonmovies.substack.com/

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Worldbreaker (2025) 55% EDIT “Anderson has an eye for harsh beauty and he’s an efficient storyteller. In the annals of post-apocalyptic baptism-of-fire stories, this one at least has more on its mind than the simple pang of childhood’s end.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 27, 2026 Full Review Mother of Flies (2025) 96% EDIT “"Mother of Flies" is plenty creepy and walks the thin line between thoroughly professional polish and being just rough enough around the edges to feel queasily real.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 22, 2026 Full Review 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) 92% EDIT “Moving beyond the pastoral survival horror of '28 Years Later,' 'The Bone Temple' is a well-realized nightmare world in and of itself ... [and] deserves significant credit for not relaxing into man-against-monster smackdown....” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 15, 2026 Full Review Primate (2025) 79% EDIT “'Primate' doesn’t aim high and doesn’t add much to the annals of animal horror films ... [b]ut it’s efficient, it delivers what it promises and, for gorehounds, it has just enough blood’n’guts. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 8, 2026 Full Review We Bury the Dead (2024) 86% EDIT “[D]isturbing yet somehow pastoral ... "We Bury the Dead" starts the new year with meditative horror, one that is as visceral about dead relationships as it is about dead people.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Jan 2, 2026 Full Review Influencers (2025) 96% EDIT “What's great about [both "Influencer" and "Influencers"] is ... they are actually quite harsh about the culture of influencers.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Dec 28, 2025 Full Review The Housemaid (2025) 74% EDIT “[A]n admittedly dynamic mid-movie twist ... breaks from the linear narrative. [But] the story really doesn’t have the heft (or any sort of plausible conclusion) to justify the length. I never connected with the characters sufficiently to care about them.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Dec 20, 2025 Full Review Resurrection (2025) 89% EDIT “RESURRECTION isn’t tailored for a mainstream commercial market; its audience is moviegoers looking to see something both unfamiliar and subtly unsettling, as the world of dreams often is. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Dec 12, 2025 Full Review Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025) 16% EDIT “The story is muddled [with] ... inexplicable specifics along with baffling contradictions of time and geography plus a plot seemingly designed by M. C. Escher....” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Dec 4, 2025 Full Review The Thing with Feathers (2025) 46% EDIT “It’s about coping, wrapped in a fantastical context that I found more compelling than most stories rooted in the brutal ordinariness of loss and grief.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Nov 28, 2025 Full Review Dream Eater (2025) 68% EDIT “'Dream Eater' may trod familiar ground but it’s a tidy little story efficiently told.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Nov 20, 2025 Full Review Keeper (2025) 53% EDIT “[T]hese days I often find myself appreciating a smart filmmaker doing a variation on a theme I’ve seen many times before. But 'Keeper' genuinely surprised me with its magician-like misdirections and its eventual connect-the-dots precision.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Nov 13, 2025 Full Review Predator: Badlands (2025) 86% EDIT “Bear with me for just a minute as I say, “Huh. 'Predator: Badlands' is a BUDDY movie!” — pretty much the last thing I expected. But it is, and kudos to all involved: It actually works.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Nov 6, 2025 Full Review House of Ashes (2025) 71% EDIT “Her movie has visual style to spare — colorful, vertiginous, even seemingly gialli-inspired at times — and it has a strong point of view of the terrible topicality of the attacks on women’s bodily autonomy.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 30, 2025 Full Review Shelby Oaks (2023) 55% EDIT “[A] skillfully made pastiche of horror-movie tropes and influences. Writer-director-producer Christopher Stuckmann ... both knows and loves the genre. Unfortunately, "Shelby Oaks" is also a slow burn that doesn’t deliver an incendiary payoff. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 23, 2025 Full Review Frankenstein (2025) 85% EDIT “[A]n impressive achievement. ... [D]el Toro’s Frankenstein is steeped in death and, like the cream of the movie crop, driven by the creature. ” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 16, 2025 Full Review Death Line (1972) 87% EDIT “RAW MEAT isn’t just going for the shocks...but aims to capture a real sense of a sociopolitically fractured time. ... [It] is both eerie and deeply sad, with a more heartbreaking poignancy than one would ever expect from a film of this [U.S-release] title” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 9, 2025 Full Review Coyotes (2025) 59% EDIT “Sitting on the classier side of this [nature-strikes-back horror] subgenre, COYOTES ... plays its hand well: The coyotes are just being coyotes — they’re not a genetic-engineering experiment gone wrong.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 2, 2025 Full Review V/H/S Halloween (2025) 89% EDIT “[H]andsomely produced, well-acted and creepy[,]...even the couple that are a bit "Tales from the Crypt"-ish, albeit if "Tales from the Crypt" had gotten a spectacular deal on corn-syrup blood and pig intestines. ... [T]here isn’t a weak link in the chain.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Oct 1, 2025 Full Review Good Boy (2025) 90% EDIT “[The fim is] unsettling without overshadowing the delicate veil of melancholy that surrounds Todd ... [and] more wistful and bittersweet than it is morbid. It’s a story not only of things that go bump in the night, but of the cold nose that bumps back.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 25, 2025 Full Review Dead of Winter (2025) 75% EDIT “Set in a cold blue rural Minnesota, 'Dead of Winter' is an accomplished blend of conventional thriller and Midwestern quirk. ... [Director Brian Kirk's] steely, unblinking eye distracts from anything the plot doesn’t address or glosses over.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 23, 2025 Full Review Hard Eight (1996) 82% 2.5/5 EDIT “Ultimately, the material is so familiar that it's hard to work up any enthusiasm for another trip [through] the seamy underside of glittering gaming life. ” – TV Guide Sep 22, 2025 Full Review Night of the Reaper (2025) 80% EDIT “[I]t delivers a convincing sense of time and place and, de rigueur, some bloody murders. It isn’t one for the ages, but hardcore Halloween buffs might want to give it a slot in their annual spooktacular movie-marathon lineup.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 18, 2025 Full Review Queen of Manhattan (2022) EDIT “[S]et during the adult-film industry’s golden age, some 12 to 15 years of primarily the ‘70s with a bit of ‘60s and ‘80s on either end ... it’s a nicely evocative trip back to that rightly fabled time and place. If anything, it’s not gritty *enough*.” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 17, 2025 Full Review The Long Walk (2025) 88% EDIT “[T]he walkers progress through stages of mentality and personality that eventually takes each to their core. I wouldn’t call it "My Dinner with Andre" on a forced march, but it’s much more psychologically literate than one might expect from the premise...” – MaitlandOnMovies (Substack) Sep 11, 2025 Full Review
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