Ever since Scream 2 opened with the premiere of the movie-within-the-movie Stab, based on the events of the previous installment, the horror franchise has been built around references to itself. The original Scream, released in 1996, is a clever deconstruction of slasher-movie conventions that’s also a masterfully effective slasher movie on its own, thanks to the […]
Author: Josh Bell
Demonic
It’s been six years since Neill Blomkamp’s last feature film, and in the meantime he’s been attached to failed franchise reboots (Alien, RoboCop) and has been quietly making short films with his Oats Studios company. Blomkamp’s new indie feature Demonic feels like an outgrowth of those proof-of-concept short films, a thinly conceived genre story that exists […]
Luca
A pleasant if predictable fable about acceptance and diversity, Luca is a lesser effort from Pixar Animation Studios, which still places it above most animated feature films. It’s full of lovely animation and appealing characters, in a well-realized setting that draws from both mythology and history. For its target kid audience, Luca is perfectly effective, […]
Marathon
No one makes Christopher Guest movies like Christopher Guest, as filmmakers Anthony Guidubaldi and Keith Strausbaugh prove with their Guest-style mockumentary Marathon. But just because Marathon doesn’t match up to the brilliance of Guest films like Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show doesn’t mean that it isn’t entertaining, and Guidubaldi and Strausbaugh put together […]
Shiva Baby
Being spoiled can be stifling, as Danielle (Rachel Sennott) demonstrates in writer-director Emma Seligman’s assured debut feature Shiva Baby. College senior Danielle is spoiled by her sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferrari), who bestows her with cash and jewelry after their morning bedroom romp. He thinks he’s helping her pay for law school, but she’s really […]
I Care a Lot
Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) is a terrible person. The scam that she runs isn’t illegal, exactly, but it’s immoral and unethical and just plain mean. Marla targets vulnerable senior citizens who have little to no family connections and possess substantial financial assets, and she colludes with a doctor to get a court to declare those […]
79 Parts
It’s not easy to make a convincing period piece on a small budget, but director Ari Taub pulls it off surprisingly well with his 1970s-set crime drama 79 Parts. This is the kind of movie that lets the mustaches and accents do most of the work, but it’s full of entertaining mustaches and accents, attached […]
Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar
Kristen Wiig played plenty of strange, baffling characters on Saturday Night Live, but her movie career has been focused more on grounded roles, even in broad comedies like Bridesmaids or Ghostbusters. That changes with Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar, starring and written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo (who also co-wrote Bridesmaids). This […]
One Night in Miami
Four icons of 1960s Black culture didn’t actually gather in a Miami hotel room on the night of February 25, 1964, to discuss important personal and societal issues, but playwright Kemp Powers’ imagined version of that meeting feels genuine. Regina King effectively adapts Powers’ One Night in Miami into a feature film (with a screenplay by […]
Pieces of a Woman
After a few short opening scenes, Pieces of a Woman plunges the viewer into a harrowing 23-minute single-take sequence of childbirth gone wrong, as Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) slowly realize that their home birth with midwife Eva (Molly Parker) is not going to end with the joyous event they anticipated. […]
Soul
After exploring the complex world of anthropomorphic emotions in 2015’s Inside Out, Pixar’s Pete Docter takes on the complex world of the afterlife in Soul, which deals with similarly melancholy themes. As in Inside Out, director and co-writer Docter takes on some weighty existential ideas for what is ostensibly a family-focused animated movie, and Soul […]
News of the World
Tom Hanks may be getting a little weary of his designated role as America’s surrogate dad, but it fits him perfectly in the appealingly old-fashioned Western News of the World, which reunites Hanks with Captain Phillips director Paul Greengrass. Greengrass is known for the gritty immediacy of both his fact-based dramas like Captain Phillips, United […]
The Racer
Set during the doping scandal of the 1998 Tour de France, The Racer is a fictional story reflective of cycling culture at the time, in which the use of performance-enhancing drugs was a widespread open secret. But director and co-writer Kieron J. Walsh isn’t interested in social commentary, and there’s very little judgment here of […]
Run
After putting a fresh spin on the missing-teen thriller with his 2018 debut Searching, which took place entirely on computer and cell phone screens, director Aneesh Chaganty opts for a more traditional format for his second feature, Run. Although it’s presented conventionally, Run still takes a smart approach to a familiar thriller plot, delivering another […]
Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad
When you think of skateboarding culture, a working-class London suburb is probably not the first place that comes to mind, but that’s exactly where the mecca of European skateboarding emerged in the late 1970s. Matt Harris’ documentary Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad explores the unlikely rise and even unlikelier legacy of the Rom Skatepark, a […]
Wolfwalkers
Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon started making movies on a small scale with 2009’s The Secret of Kells, a gorgeously illustrated fable inspired by Irish folklore, and the company has grown in size and reputation over the course of its first three features, all of which were nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Wolfwalkers […]
The Dark and the Wicked
When The Strangers was released in 2008, it looked like the beginning of a major horror career for writer-director Bryan Bertino, who created one of the most intense, unsettling movies of the past 20 years. But Bertino struggled to follow up his initial success and to recapture the acclaim of his debut. It was six […]
Chasing Einstein
Even nearly 70 years after his death, Albert Einstein is still likely to be one of the top answers (along with, presumably, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye the Science Guy) if the average person is asked to name a famous scientist. But there have been decades of further advancement on Einstein’s theories by dozens […]
Clouds
Actor turned director Justin Baldoni must really have a thing for the love lives of terminally ill teens, which have been the subject of both of his feature films thus far. After making his directorial debut with the 2019 weepie Five Feet Apart, about a romance between two teens with cystic fibrosis, Baldoni returns with […]
Spark: A Burning Man Story
Even back in 2012, the annual Burning Man gathering (organizers prefer not to call it a “festival”) was experiencing serious growing pains, and the event has only gotten bigger and more unwieldy since then. It’s also gotten much more famous and influential, and the 2013 documentary Spark: A Burning Man Story provides an interesting snapshot of […]