Cloverfield

Ah, to be young and in love. The butterflies, the sense of the future’s great possibilities, the need to traverse a city besieged by a towering monster in order to rescue your heart’s flame from her destroyed apartment building . . . wait, I’m mixing up Hallmark movies with the 2008 found-footage horror monster movie Cloverfield, directed by Matthew Reeves. Oh well, as long as we’re talking about it, we might as well mention that Cloverfield has had an outsized impact since its release. It’s spawned two uh, spinoffs? Sequels? Whatever, there’s more than one movie with the word Cloverfield in the title is the point, and it all started with a low-budget kaiju flick that gave audiences a terrifyingly close look at what the reality of a giant monster on a walking tour of New York City would look like. To christen the new year, then, let us return to this curious genre-bender in the first episode of Magellans at the Movies in 2024! Grab your camcorder and superglue it to your hand because you won’t want to miss a thing!