It's the Pictures Turns One (On Ghost)

It’s the Pictures turns one! If you visit the website you might notice some changes. I encourage newsletter readers to visit the main page, check out the new theme, and see the full breadth of content available from It’s the Pictures. 

Thank you for being part of Year One of It’s the Pictures on Ghost. The website launched here on November 2nd, 2025 and allowed me to separate myself from the Substack ecosystem. I had to leave Substack for a number of reasons including how problematic they are. 

Leaving Substack came with a lot of pain points. I didn’t really know which platform I should choose, and I didn’t know how involved it might be to move everything off there and onto a new website. Then there’s the discoverability of it all. Substack has built-in tools to help users find newsletters they might be interested in following. Ghost has come a long way from where the platform first began, but I wouldn’t say it's a robust search engine. Honestly I’ve gotten additional follows through recommendations from authors like Ty Burr and Andrew Liptak. If you’ve started following me through those sites, thank you for following me on this journey. 

If you haven’t listened to the podcast or visited our YouTube page, you are missing out on a big part of It’s the Pictures. There are biweekly episodes where we talk about the latest in film and tv, and we often have special guests appear on the show. I try to share episodes through the newsletter when possible, but the best way to get recent episodes is to follow the YouTube page.

In the past year, I’ve published 85 articles, and the podcast just released its 232nd episode. I’ve also picked up the pace considerably: I’ve published just as many, if not more, articles in the past six months as I did in the first six months. For those who are coming to It’s the Pictures for the first time, here are some articles I’d like to highlight:

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Is a Strong Spider-Man Story Undercut by Shoehorned MCU Connections

The last time the world saw Tom Holland’s Spider-Man was way back in December of 2021. That entry in the Spider-Man filmography felt particularly vital, not only because it turned into a celebration of every Spider-Man movie before it, but because it was launched as the

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The Greatest Twilight Zone Episodes: 5 Classic Stories That Still Hold Up

Continuing my coverage of The Twilight Zone from yesterday, I wanted to share my thoughts on some of the best stories Twilight Zone has to offer. This extended coverage is in honor of Alan Sepinwall's new novel, Serling: A Journey into the Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary,

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The History of Concrete Is More Interesting Than It Has Any Right to Be

What’s in a name? For the new documentary feature, The History of Concrete, this particular name might signal a topic that few people would be interested in. But they’d be missing out. Documentary filmmaker John Wilson has been documenting the mundane for at least the last decade– originally

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John Woo's Masterpiece Hard Boiled Has Never Looked Better

Director John Woo will be familiar to most North American film fans for his work on Hard Target, Mission: Impossible 2, and Face/Off– mostly mediocre action films that have their fans. What audiences might not know is that before Woo came to America, he directed a fantastic run of

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Where to Buy Physical Media in 2025?

Without Best Buy and Target, where can you buy movies?

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Excalibur Comes Home With A Miraculous 4K UHD Worthy of Legend

I love myself a good sword-and-sorcery movie—heroes with great bravado, legendary swords of myth, and epic tales of kings. There was a wave of these movies in the ‘80s, from movies like The Beastmaster and Willow, to more memorable classics of the genre in Dragonslayer and Conan

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You Can See Everything Review: A Film That Delivers the Unexpected and Then Some

How does someone even begin to provide truth in our age? As A.I. continues to invade every facet of our lives, filling screens with deepfakes, how can we really determine what is objectively true? Convicted fraudster and Theranos founder Elizabeth “Liz” Holmes wants you to believe her innocence and

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Olivia Wilde's The Invite Proves Her Directing Prowess

Olivia Wilde began her directing career with the sensational, Booksmart. I loved that coming-of-age comedy and thought Wilde was a director to watch. Then came Don't Worry Darling with its disastrous press tour and subpar film almost derailing Wilde's promising career. The Invite sees her working

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Now I’m going to be real for a second, the financials of It’s the Pictures still don’t work. Between Ghost, podcasting expenses, movie tickets, and everything else that goes into making this publication, It’s the Pictures doesn’t come close to breaking even. 

But rather than give up, I’ve invested in a custom theme for the website so that subscribers can better access the full archive of It’s the Pictures and the site becomes a better home for everything I publish. None of this would have been possible without paid subscribers as they’ve taken some burden off and I’m grateful for your support. 

Now, we're heading into Year Two—and I want to keep building. To celebrate the anniversary, you can subscribe at the current annual price of $30 per year before it increases to $50 per year on November 10. This $30 a year price will be good as long as your subscription to It’s the Pictures stays active.  

If you've been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, this is an excellent time to join and support independent film writing as we head into our second year.

Subscribe at $30/year by November 9th.

Thank you for being part of Year One. I hope you’ll join me as It’s the Pictures turns the page to Year Two.