The circumstances under which Mary Shelley conceived of and began writing Frankenstein have become almost as well-known as the novel itself, and have been dramatized onscreen Read More

Book Club opens with a series of painfully fake-looking photos featuring the younger versions of its main characters, supposedly four college friends who started the group Read More

When Jen (Matilda Lutz) first shows up onscreen in Revenge, she’s literally sucking on a lollipop, like a caricature of a ditzy blonde sex doll. She’s Read More

A little over halfway through the screening of 1928 silent comedy Show People at this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, the fire alarm in Read More

When Amy Schumer made her debut as a big-screen lead with 2015’s Trainwreck, she brought a strong personal perspective to the movie, as both the writer Read More

The very first thing that alleged best friends Olivia (Pretty Little Liars’ Lucy Hale) and Markie (Violett Beane) do in the moronic horror movie Truth or Read More

When Tony Gilroy first wrote the screenplay for Beirut in 1991, it was considered too politically risky to make. While movie producers may be bolder about Read More

The selling point in the trailers for Blockers has been its over-the-top comedy featuring stars Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz as overprotective parents attempting Read More

There are plenty of easy jokes to make about the title of Where Is Kyra?, given how purposely underlit the entire movie is. But director and Read More

Director Lynn Shelton’s most successful movies (including Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister and Laggies) have deftly balanced emotionally resonant drama with gentle comedy, but with Outside In Read More

Teenager Katie Price (Bella Thorne), the main character of Midnight Sun, suffers from a real disease known as xeroderma pigmentosum, but she might as well suffer Read More

The giants that young teenager Barbara Thorson (Madison Wolfe) claims to kill in I Kill Giants are almost certainly not real, but for most of its Read More

The opening of 7 Days in Entebbe lays out its historical context in title cards that appear to the rhythm of a dance troupe’s performance, but Read More

When the trailers for Red Sparrow were first released, they drew numerous comparisons to Marvel’s Black Widow character, a Russian spy trained from an early age Read More

The atmosphere is thick in Irish horror movie The Lodgers, both in director Brian O’Malley’s style and in the remote location of a crumbling rural estate. Read More

At this point, it’s not surprising to see Nicolas Cage starring in yet another cheap, trashy straight-to-VOD thriller; what’s more unusual is when he shows up Read More

Whatever its other flaws, French filmmaker François Ozon’s erotic thriller Double Lover certainly doesn’t hold back in its depiction of sexuality. The opening shot shows main Read More

When the title character of Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman first appears onscreen, she seems poised to live up to the movie’s billing of her: Marina Read More

A minor character in writer-director Jonas Carpignano’s first feature, 2015’s Mediterranea, 14-year-old Pio (Pio Amato), a Romani living in the Italian port town of Gioia Tauro, Read More

For an assassin who’s touted as the best around (commanding a price of $2 million a day to take out a potential corporate whistleblower), Trevor Conrad Read More