Justin S. Harrison

Howdy! I'm an author, critic, editor, and essayist based in Austin, Texas.

My Favorite Work

Hyperreal Film Club •

For John Woo, the Best Way to Get to A Better Tomorrow During Uncertain Times is Brotherhood — Hyperreal Film Club

With the opening of 1986’s A Better Tomorrow, director John Woo and star Chow Yun Fat captured “cool” with skill and style that very few have been able to  match since. A crew of gangsters, including life-long friends Sung-tse Ho (Ti Lung) and Mark (Chow), watch their counterfeiting operation produce sheet after sheet of faux dollars. As they inspect the freshly minted funny money, Mark takes a $100 bill, sets it ablaze, and uses the flames to light a cigar. Clad in a dashing longcoat and ultra-...
Anime Herald •

How "Call of the Night" Uses Its Vampires to Build Its Structure

Vampires, as a storytelling tool, come with rules. They’ll vary depending on the type of vampire and what sort of story they’re telling, but one rule stands out as a reliable constant: vampires are nocturnal beings. Barring unusual supernatural powers or an explicit plot to blot out the sun, most vampire stories have a hard limit on when key characters can be active, one backed by potentially explosive consequences. Call of the Night, mangaka Kotoyama’s five-year vampire romance, turns this limi...
AIPT •

Meredith Gran talks ‘Perfect Tides’, time’s inexorable march, and the internet as it was in 2000

Meredith Gran rules. Octopus Pie, her 2007-2017 webcomic, is for my money one of the medium’s all-time great works. Her major post-Octopus Pie creative project—the crowd-funded point and click adventure game Perfect Tides, launched on Tuesday. It’s terrific — a witty and thoughtful coming of age story that navigates the goofy and the heavy with care and skill amidst gorgeous artwork, compulsively readable prose, and clever puzzles. AIPT was able to speak with Gran in the run-up to Perfect Tides‘
The Gutter Review •

A Place Both Webbed and Strange: Reading Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man as a Twin Peaks Riff

“Perceptions” is a fascinating, if not wholly successful, comic. After kicking off Spider-Man with “Torment”, a story that played to his strengths as an artist and writer (visual emphasis on Spider-Man in motion, horror beats built on the grotesque and the mystical) McFarlane takes a genuine swing and tries to stretch himself. “Perceptions” is a mystery that questions society’s systems of power, a horror story where the supernatural is less terrifying than the domestic/familiar, and to some extent a deconstructive presentation of Spider-Man.

Most intriguing of all, “Perceptions” is, deliberately or otherwise, deeply influenced by and riffing on David Lynch, Mark Frost, and company’s once-beloved-then-discounted-now-again-beloved and highly influential supernatural mystery/horror/slice of life television series Twin Peaks.
The Comics Journal •

Perspective and Time in Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie

One of the things that has long fascinated me about the way comics work is the extent to which the art of it is about controlling perception. Within a panel, the reader sees a specific image. On its own, the image is an image. In concert with other panels, it becomes sequential art – the comic’s creator(s) directing the reader’s eye and mind from image to image. But it’s not just motion and the passage of time that a comics page creates; it’s the perception of them.

My Ongoing Work

Hyperreal Film Club •

The Running Man Sprints to a Win Despite Some Major Stumbles — Hyperreal Film Club

The Running Man also offers plenty of others pleasures to go with Powell’s fine turn. Edgar Wright, re-teaming with Scott Pilgrim co-writer Michael Baccall, adapts the Stephen King novel of the same name (one of several he wrote under the pen name Richard Bachman), a dystopian thriller set in a world where the wealthy powerful keep the less fortunate in line by stoking their bloodlust and making sure they turn it on each other. Every home has a Free-Vee, a gift from the terrifyingly powerful cor...
Hyperreal Film Club •

AFF '25: Jay Kelly — Hyperreal Film Club

With Jay Kelly Baumbach and his creative collaborators have crafted a gentle, biting character study that, for all its many virtues, ends up more admirable than successful. This is down to Jay Kelly, the character. Specifically, it’s down to Jay’s fundamental hollowness. He’s driven by fear: the fear that the work he’s devoted his life to does not mean anything, the fear that his drive to be a capital letters Movie Star has cost him time and relationships that he cannot recover, the fear that th...
AIPT •

‘DIE: Loaded’ #1 sees Hans and Gillen change their game

The party’s first quest through DIE as teenagers was a thrilling, terrifying, traumatic, and transformative adventure, during which they learned the rules of the game’s world. Their second quest was even more thrilling, terrifying, traumatic, and transformative, since the party now had to fight the game’s rules as much as they did vampires and steampunk armies while treating with hobbits caught up in World War I. Being a magical knight powered by your own sadness and depression is one thing when...
Hyperreal Film Club •

For John Woo, the Best Way to Get to A Better Tomorrow During Uncertain Times is Brotherhood — Hyperreal Film Club

With the opening of 1986’s A Better Tomorrow, director John Woo and star Chow Yun Fat captured “cool” with skill and style that very few have been able to  match since. A crew of gangsters, including life-long friends Sung-tse Ho (Ti Lung) and Mark (Chow), watch their counterfeiting operation produce sheet after sheet of faux dollars. As they inspect the freshly minted funny money, Mark takes a $100 bill, sets it ablaze, and uses the flames to light a cigar. Clad in a dashing longcoat and ultra-...
Hyperreal Film Club •

Nobody 2 Review — Hyperreal Film Club

Moreover, while the picture is certainly fun, it’s a general, vague fun that never quite builds its own identity. When Odenkirk cuts loose for the first time in the first film, it works not only because the fight is skillfully choreographed and filmed and Odenkirk threw himself into mastering screenfighting, but also because it takes his star image and transforms it. Likewise, part of what makes Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us sing is the way in which Tjahjanto and company interlink the visua...
Hyperreal Film Club •

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a Bitsy, Banal, Bland Jaunt — Hyperreal Film Club

In the movie, Farrell and Robbie are David and Sarah, two lonely people who meet at their mutual friends’ wedding but who are both so guarded that they’d rather ignore their mutual attraction than risk getting hurt. Unbeknownst to either of them, the ambiguously divine powers that be (manifesting as a car rental company run by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the latter sporting an inexplicable German accent) will not have that. David and Sarah will push past the walls they’ve built around...
Anime Herald •

How "Call of the Night" Uses Its Vampires to Build Its Structure

Vampires, as a storytelling tool, come with rules. They’ll vary depending on the type of vampire and what sort of story they’re telling, but one rule stands out as a reliable constant: vampires are nocturnal beings. Barring unusual supernatural powers or an explicit plot to blot out the sun, most vampire stories have a hard limit on when key characters can be active, one backed by potentially explosive consequences. Call of the Night, mangaka Kotoyama’s five-year vampire romance, turns this limi...
AIPT •

‘The Woman with Fifty Faces’ offers disappointingly little behind its masks

Zackary J. Pinson and Jonathan Lackman’s The Woman With Fifty Faces is not a bad comic, but it is an unsuccessful one. Its subject, alleged film star turned model to over fifty of the early 20th century’s most significant artists Maria Lani, is fascinating. Its craft is impeccable, especially illustrator Pinson’s invocation of the grotesque when depicting horrors and his presentation of some of the styles in which Lani was immortalized. But, for all that Pinson and Lackman do well, their work is...
Hyperreal Film Club •

F1 (2025) Review — Hyperreal Film Club

Joseph Kosinski’s F1, a combination sports/coming-of-age/cool-aging-guy-still-has-it movie, has a lot that works. Brad Pitt has turned his movie star charisma to the max, Damson Idris proves himself a worthy young foil to Pitt, Kerry Condon is a steely romantic lead, and Javier Bardem is frequently a hoot. Hans Zimmer’s score is, no pun intended, driving. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda (a long-time Kosinski collaborator going back to Tron: Legacy) skillfully captures the beauty and the power of...
AIPT •

‘Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition’ offers a stunning, finely-tuned world

Deep in the depths of space floats Mira. It’s a beautiful world, from its wide green plains to its dense jungles, from its mountainous deserts to its volcanic hotbeds. Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition takes is set in a vibrant world, home to a host of creatures great small, from lean pack hunters and their offspring to towering behemoths that would make an apatosaur jealous of the adorably floofy, traveling Nopon people. It’s a mysterious place, haunted by massive ruins and mysterious...
Hyperreal Film Club •

Film Notes: Pan's Labyrinth — Hyperreal Film Club

You can always count on Guillermo del Toro to make an interesting movie. His weakest pictures still offer striking images and ideas worth chewing on, while his strongest have a knack for getting their harpoons in the brain and hanging on for dear life. Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto Del Fauno) may be his finest hour. del Toro expertly interweaves a young girl’s journey into a fairy realm with her family’s fraught life in Francoist Spain, where the mystic informs the real, and the real informs the...
Hyperreal Film Club •

Warfare Review — Hyperreal Film Club

On paper, co-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare is simple. Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL, is recreating a disastrous mission he and his unit undertook in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. A unit of Mendoza’s platoon occupied a two-story, two-apartment home to provide overwatch for ground forces due to move through the area. Al Qaeda fighters realized the house was occupied and launched a series of attacks on the home, severely injuring several members of the unit. The SEALs, after a failed atte...
Hyperreal Film Club •

Neighborhood Watch Review — Hyperreal Film Club

Simon McNally (Jack Quaid) is struggling. He lives with paranoid schizophrenia, which commonly manifests as vivid auditory and visual hallucinations of his abusive father (Jonathan Fuller), and is trying to ease back into the world after an extended and involuntary hospitalization. Ed Deerman (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is struggling. He lives alone in the wake of his wife’s death and the end of his job as head of security for a local college. No one wants to see Simon because he makes them uncomforta...
Hyperreal Film Club •

The Glassworker spins a striking tale that gets why Miyazaki’s work is so beloved — Hyperreal Film Club

Of all the insidious things about the recent plague of AI slop that tries to mimic the work of Studio Ghibli (specifically director Hayao Miyazaki), the flattening sticks with me. To the algorithm and the schmucks who turn to it for dopamine, Ghibli and Miyazaki are pastoral vistas and wholesome young people and piles upon piles of anime food and nothing else. There’s nary a look at the way violence corrodes all it touches, nor a struggle with life’s impeccable ability to hurt to be seen. Maybe...
Hyperreal Film Club •

And, Towards Happy Alleys Shares Its Creator’s Passion and Sparks the Audience’s — Hyperreal Film Club

Throughout And, Toward Happy Alleys’ 75 minutes, Singh engages her subjects on why they do what they do, what moves them to do so, and how they navigate their callings, from activism to filmmaking, in an often extremely hostile environment. Singh’s passion for Iranian art is evident in the insightful questions she asks and the folks she seeks out to interview, such as former child actor Aida Mohammadkhani, who appears in Panahi’s The White Balloon. In another case, she visits the home of legenda...
Hyperreal Film Club •

With On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Rungano Nyoni Pulls Truth from the Depths of Memory — Hyperreal Film Club

Amidst the tension and surrealism, Nyoni and the acting ensemble craft a moving and unsettling film. The family failed Shula, Nsansa, and Bupe. Their Aunties admit as much. Despite that, they insist on mourning Fred as the best version of himself, “ever jovial and joyous,” even though everyone who held power in the family, who could conceivably have stopped him, knew he was a predator. Despite crying for their children, the Aunties seize on the widow’s anxiousness and raw, angry grief to make he...
AIPT •

‘Snotgirl’ #20 brings the arc to a close with mutable memories

Since Leslie Hung and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl returned late last year, the surreal sunshine comic noir has paired every answer to one of its mysteries with a new question. Readers know, for instance, that Charlotte “Lottie” Person, allergy-prone fashion influencer sometimes-extraordinaire, really does seem to have befriended a ghost. Her name is Yolanda, and she’s probably not a dodgy-allergy-meds-induced hallucination. Conversely, while the audience has a fix on how Lottie’s mercurial bel...
Hyperreal Film Club •

SXSW '25: O’Dessa signifies nothing, and doesn’t even offer sound or fury — Hyperreal Film Club

O’Dessa’s driving theory as a musical is that the titular heroine’s music, accompanied first by her guitar and eventually by musicians moved by her work to join in, is pure and healing in its realness compared to the cruel artificiality of Satylite City. Acknowledging that I’m not a musicologist, Sink is a talented singer with an impressive vocal range. O’Dessa sticks her with songs that range from the leadenly expository to the emptily inane. The film’s best song, its showstopping 11 o’clock nu...
Hyperreal Film Club •

SXSW '25: LifeHack — Hyperreal Film Club

Kyle (Georgie Farmer), Syd (Roman Hayeck Green), Petey (James Scholz), and Alex (Yasmin Finney) have been internet friends for years. Their shared chatroom is a place to game, swap music, tell stories, commiserate over their lives and families, and occasionally engage in what they tell themselves is Robin Hood-style cybercrime. It’s just that they keep the money and are willing to drop law enforcement (if not SWAT) on the scam call centers they counter-scam. The named-after-Stephen-King’s Loser’...
Hyperreal Film Club •

SXSW '25: Bunny’s Beautifully Crafted Chaos Thrills — Hyperreal Film Club

Bunny (Mo Stark, also co-writer), the titular lead of the dramedy Bunny, which premiered at SXSW 2025, is the sort of guy you’d want for a neighbor. He’s a bit of a hustler, but he’s out to get through the day, not rip people off. He’s a sex worker and jack-of-all-trades who knows everyone in his building, from his wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) and best friend Dino (Ben Jacobson, also director and writer) to landlady Linda (Linda Rong Mei Chen) to the girls throwing a party a floor below to those two...
Hyperreal Film Club •

SXSW '25: Reeling — Hyperreal Film Club

Reeling is filmmaker Yana Alliata’s first narrative feature, and it’s a strong debut and a worthy feature at SXSW 2025. Ryan Brown played Hamlet once. He had the whole play memorized. That was before a motorcycle collision shattered his mind and his body. Five years later, Ryan (Ryan Wuestewald) has put himself back together as well as possible. He knows that he’ll never recover some of what he had pre-collision. He can get through the day with regular meds and a careful schedule. He can drive a...
The Spool •

Black Bag is a mannered, merciless delight

Severus has slipped its leash. It was never supposed to leave the cavernous, cold corridors of British Intelligence’s chic HQ. But it did. There is a mole. Severus is in the wind. If it’s used, thousands will die. Badly. Thus, intelligence operative Philip Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) turns to George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), a superb analyst who hates liars to ferret out Severus’ thief. 


There are five suspects. Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) is a rising and passionate star in the...
AIPT •

‘Snotgirl’ #19 shifts mode and mood

Leslie Hung and Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Snotgirl never rests on its laurels. It returned from its long hiatus with a low-key look at fashion blogger Lottie Person’s newfound romance with riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery-wrapped-in-an-enigma model Caroline. It dialed up the covert life of Caroline’s long-suffering brother Virgil. It introduced a hidden past in the Japanese idol scene for Lottie’s mother, Kimiko, and her aunt, Aya. With issue #19, Hung and O’Malley have officially moved Snotgirl into the...
Hyperreal Film Club •

Review: Paolo Sorrentino's Parthenope — Hyperreal Film Club

Parthenope is my first Paolo Sorrentino film. I’ll give it this—it’s made me curious about his other work. From being a film dweeb, I know that he’s a well-regarded filmmaker, someone who folks get excited about. From seeing Parthenope, I know he and his collaborators can craft stunning montages and striking episodes that deftly balance the familiar and the bizarre and that they’re good at finding interesting faces. I’d like to check out Sorrentino and his crew’s oeuvre, both because of what’s s...
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