Fran Casillas Profile

Fran Casillas

Following12

Followers 28

Articles17
Discussions
Lists13
Videos
Reviews5

Supplanting Superman: A Faltering Reboot in Search of First Principles

I think, therefore I am offered René Descartes a rock on which to build a metaphysics. Superman 2025 was supposed to give James Gunn an equally unshakable cornerstone for a fresh DC universe. Instead, the film looks around for a footing, finds none, and sinks beneath the silt of its own ambitions. From the first scene it is clear that Gunn wants relevance more than resonance. The script darts after every modern anxiety, social media pile-ons, algorithmic propaganda, proxy wars, yet never lingers

22 views

Supplanting Superman: A Faltering Reboot in Search of First Principles

Algotheosis and Simulacra: A Spring 2025 Anime Debrief

The flowers on my windowsill are already wilting in Chicago’s July heat, yet I still feel the kinetic pollen storm of Spring 2025 buzzing in my skull. Before the Summer simulcasts overrun my queue, here is a reckoning with the season we just buried, and with the two titles that kept me wide eyed long after the credits. Season's Top Dog To Be Hero X Everything about Studio BeDream’s Sino-Japanese anthology chimera felt knowingly extra, from its kaleidoscopic mash of 2D and 3D to its weekly cliffh

33 views

Algotheosis and Simulacra: A Spring 2025 Anime Debrief

Perpetual Ignition: Growth Is a Constant on the F1 Circuit

For maximum immersion, please play the above as you read Childhood ends many times. A first heartbreak, a first rebellion, a first funeral: each one snaps another vertebra in the cartoon spine of youth. Cinema usually drops the checkered flag on adolescence at eighteen. Win the championship, kiss your sweetheart, roll credits. F1: The Movie rips that myth from the asphalt. Director Joseph Kosinski parks the viewer in the cockpit beside veteran racer Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) and demands a question

64 views

Perpetual Ignition: Growth Is a Constant on the F1 Circuit

Rebirth of a Leviathan: Radical Honesty, Sanitised Carnage, and the Future of the Jurassic Mythos

I arrived at AMC’s hush hush Screen Unseen event with no clue about the reel that would roar awake in front of me. When the title card for Jurassic World Rebirth flashed its enamelled glyphs across the screen and the auditorium erupted in applause, I felt the old Hammond park electricity crackling through the rows.It was an electricity the previous Chris Pratt trilogy tried to bottle but never quite harnessed. That run mistook bombast for wonder, trading Spielbergian awe for loud gadgetry. By co

marvelousmars: I'm not a fan of the genre, let alone the series (the biggest shock of this article for me was reading that there was a new installment lol), but I'm not surprised by anything in your review. I think you're so right when you write that "Blockbuster cinema long ago became a simulation chamber where we pay to flirt with annihilation without bruising the skin". It's not just Jurassic Park, it's everything major studios are putting out. Nothing can be new or daring because what if someone finds it uncomfortable? God forbid.The greatest tragedy of it all is that the resulting movies are just entertaining enough to keep drawing people in, so the studios have no reason to change their tune anyway. Mediocrity and safe choices seem to be a win, at least for now.

46 views

Rebirth of a Leviathan: Radical Honesty, Sanitised Carnage, and the Future of the Jurassic Mythos

Why Pompo the Cinéphile Became My Timeless North Star

Pompo the Cinéphile is a profound act of cinematic communion, an animated film that doesn't merely tell a story but offers itself as a mirror, inviting creators, dreamers, and solitary wanderers of imagination to recognize themselves within its frames. To say I'm biased would be stating the obvious, it's impossible for someone who breathes film, who sees life as footage to be edited, stories waiting patiently for capture, to remain neutral. But perhaps neutrality isn't the point here; perhaps re

44 views

Why Pompo the Cinéphile Became My Timeless North Star

When a Streaming Movie Upstages the Theatres: Bride Hard vs Deep Cover

This film is the cinematic equivalent of ordering a cocktail and getting a lukewarm can of LaCroix with a Band-Aid floating inside. So here's what happened. I woke up, threw on my pants with the kind of optimism that should be illegal after thirty, and decided to go to the movies at 10am on a Saturday. I wanted noise. I wanted spectacle. I wanted to laugh, maybe groan, maybe roll my eyes in pleasure pain. Ten minutes later I was designing an exit strategy, wondering if the projection booth doubl

32 views

When a Streaming Movie Upstages the Theatres: Bride Hard vs Deep Cover

Dementia, Duty, and Desire: Charting Manhood 28 Years Later

Danny Boyle returns like a fever dream with 28 Years Later, the unexpected but violently thrilling third installment of his once cult, now classic zombie saga. Forget the grainy, 480p Blair Witch esque desperation of 2002; Boyle armed now with razor sharp visuals and daring digital trickery, delivers an experience as polished as it is savage. The grit remains, the grime echoes through CRT filtered nostalgia, but now every drop of blood feels deliciously intentional, each scream razor cut clean.

Matthew Alan Schmidt: I'd say at least three of the infected scenes in this film deserve a spot in the All-Time Zombie Movie Top 10

107 views

Dementia, Duty, and Desire: Charting Manhood 28 Years Later

The Gospel of Rage: Humanity Unmasked in 28 Days Later

To dwell within the anxious nightmare of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later is to plunge headlong into an inferno where civilization’s fragile veneer shatters, scattering shards of humanity’s grotesque truths across the screen. Released in the deceptively distant year of 2002, this film remains brutally relevant, its lo‑fi aesthetic and ferocious realism not only enduring but thriving in the age of pandemics, television ubiquity, and post The Last of Us fatigue. From the onset, Boyle orchestrates tensi

56 views

The Gospel of Rage: Humanity Unmasked in 28 Days Later

The Diorama of Deception: Wes Anderson's Quiet Rebellion

Wes Anderson doesn't direct films so much as he curates living dioramas—immaculately arranged, tonally wry, symmetrical tableaus of whimsy and rot. The Phoenician Scheme, his latest, currently in theaters, is no exception. It’s a velvet-covered dagger, a pastel riot of familial betrayal, capitalism's gloss, and the soft revolution of choosing kindness over empire. If you've ever cracked open a dollhouse and caught the dolls mid-scheme, this film is your fever dream. Everything here is so Wes. De

Lucas.: A cera comeback implies a cera falloff... but i admit that he is wonderful in this movie

48 views

The Diorama of Deception: Wes Anderson's Quiet Rebellion

A God Dies in Reverse: How Marty Anderson Taught the Apocalypse and Stole The Life of Chuck

Some characters steal scenes. Marty Anderson stole the entire cosmos. You walk into The Life of Chuck expecting Tom Hiddleston. The trailers promised charm, dance, and emotional poignancy dressed in quirky trailer polish. Instead, the world ends with a monologue. A classroom. A chalkboard. A teacher. And Chiwetel Ejiofor, in one of the most disarmingly harrowing performances of the year, detonates the narrative in the opening act by doing something quietly catastrophic: he explains the universe.

73 views

A God Dies in Reverse: How Marty Anderson Taught the Apocalypse and Stole The Life of Chuck

Dangerous Animals: An Allegory on Childhood Trauma, the Male Gaze, and Torture Porn

There is an unsettling magnetism in the cinema of violence—a grim allure that Dangerous Animals deftly harnesses and interrogates. This film, which surfaced prominently at Cannes and currently unsettles audiences in theaters, artfully navigates the tightrope of narrative coherence, steering clear of the trap of disjointed storytelling and gratuitous sensationalism. For most of its runtime, the movie is impressively adept at crafting logical, inevitable consequences rather than random, forced hap

72 views

Dangerous Animals: An Allegory on Childhood Trauma, the Male Gaze, and Torture Porn

Turbo Granny and the Profane Grace of Evil

Dan Da Dan: Evil Eye is a collective exorcism in a dark room where the laughter turns nervous, and the color palette begins to rot. Let’s make one thing clear right out of the cursed, dripping gate: If you haven’t seen Season 1, do not watch this. The so-called “recap” is a jagged, barely coherent Rorschach test of madness—less a narrative, more a PTSD flashback stitched together by yokai-fueled panic. It’s not for newcomers. It’s not for explanation. It’s a fevered reminder to the initiated. An

50 views

Turbo Granny and the Profane Grace of Evil

Ballads of Ballistics and the Ballet of Blood: On Ballerina and the Aesthetic Excess of Operatic Violence

Prelude in Powder and Flame There are movies you watch. And then there are movies you feel—movies that detonate inside your ribcage like a cluster grenade. Ballerina, the feral and fabulous spin-kick out of the John Wick Cinematic Universe, is the latter. I caught it in Dolby, which is to say: inside a cathedral carved from sound. And every bullet, every bone snap, every krrrack of a shattering neck or blade against femur resounded like a mass held for the gods of ultraviolence. If you’re watchi

59 views

Ballads of Ballistics and the Ballet of Blood: On Ballerina and the Aesthetic Excess of Operatic Violence

On Karate Kid Legends and the Simulacrum of Honor

At some point during Karate Kid Legends, right after Jackie Chan channels grief through a steaming teacup and just before the film turns into a TikTok AMV with kung fu, I realized something. I wasn’t watching a movie—I was watching a product. A legacy-branded content block wrapped in nostalgia gauze and corporate aspirations, a Sony-flavored parfait of identity politics, moralism, and IP reclamation. It wants so badly to matter, but can’t stop checking itself in the mirror to see if it looks lik

49 views

On Karate Kid Legends and the Simulacrum of Honor

The Geometry of Willpower: Existential Symbolism in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes

In My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, beneath the genre polish of a superhero spin-off lies a textured meditation on dignity, justice, and the gravity of becoming. The narrative centers on a triptych of characters: a shy, grounded young man; a buoyant, rebellious girl; and a grizzled veteran who looms with the aura of past battles. But it’s in the literal biomechanics of their powers — the choreography of how they move through the world — that the story sketches its most potent philosophy. Koichi — o

55 views

The Geometry of Willpower: Existential Symbolism in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes

Light Points

524 Total

Badges (5)

View all

About me

Media & social communication

Demiurge | Cinematographer | Storyteller 🧠 Philosopher of the fucked 🏝️ Born of saltwater and static

Following

See all >

Ishika

Writer at Peliplat, Welcome to the Party

Gwen Pem

Recovering film school student | Peliplat Content Creator

Charlie'sMovieMoveIt

Tell me you love Coke then we are friends. | Always watch a movie with popcorn | I'm not really a smart person, I just refuse to be a fool.

CinematicSID

Joey Lopez

Filmmaker and VHS fiend. The Svengoolie of Montreal. Keep up with me on Instagram @joeylopezisdead

marvelousmars

Depressed queer socialist... and cinephile!

Let's talk about movies!

What's Peliplat? Articles Videos Library

Help Center Privacy Policy Terms of Use

User feedback

Fran Casillas

Supplanting Superman: A Faltering Reboot in Search of First Principles

Superman

Superman

Superhero

2025

Fran Casillas

Algotheosis and Simulacra: A Spring 2025 Anime Debrief

To Be Hero X

Anime Spring 2025

To Be Hero X

Kowloon Generic Romance

Fran Casillas

Perpetual Ignition: Growth Is a Constant on the F1 Circuit

F1: The Movie

Coming-of-Age on Screen

F1TheMovie

Psychology of Film

Fran Casillas

Rebirth of a Leviathan: Radical Honesty, Sanitised Carnage, and the Future of the Jurassic Mythos

Jurassic World: Rebirth

JurassicWorldRebirth

Adventure

Movie Reviews

Fran Casillas

Why Pompo the Cinéphile Became My Timeless North Star

Pompo: The Cinéphile

Old Movies, New Faves

must see movies

Adult Animation

Fran Casillas

When a Streaming Movie Upstages the Theatres: Bride Hard vs Deep Cover

Deep Cover

Movie Reviews

MissionImpossible

blood and gore

Fran Casillas

Dementia, Duty, and Desire: Charting Manhood 28 Years Later

28 Years Later

Horror

Survival

Zombie

Fran Casillas

The Gospel of Rage: Humanity Unmasked in 28 Days Later

28 Days Later

Action

Thriller

Survival

Fran Casillas

The Diorama of Deception: Wes Anderson's Quiet Rebellion

The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson

Auteur

Comedy

Fran Casillas

A God Dies in Reverse: How Marty Anderson Taught the Apocalypse and Stole The Life of Chuck

The Life of Chuck

Supporting Character Who Totally Stole the Show

stephen king

supporting character

Fran Casillas

Dangerous Animals: An Allegory on Childhood Trauma, the Male Gaze, and Torture Porn

Dangerous Animals

Cannes2025

gore

Horror

Fran Casillas

Turbo Granny and the Profane Grace of Evil

Dan Da Dan: Evil Eye

Animation

peliculas de animacion

Supernatural anime

Fran Casillas

Ballads of Ballistics and the Ballet of Blood: On Ballerina and the Aesthetic Excess of Operatic Violence

Ballerina

Ballerina

John Wick

Keanu Reeves

Fran Casillas

On Karate Kid Legends and the Simulacrum of Honor