There’s no easier way to tug on a movie audience’s heartstrings than to present them with a dying dog. That’s a lesson that author W. Bruce Read More

It’s kind of amazing to think that the Fast & Furious franchise started out with a mid-budget crime drama about street racing. By the time it’s Read More

After taking on more tightly scripted projects with her recent films and TV work, director Lynn Shelton swings all the way in the other direction with Read More

How would the world change if the most famous and influential music group of all time had never existed? According to director Danny Boyle’s slight and Read More

From the beginning, John Shaft was always about fighting for the underdog. In 1971’s blaxploitation classic Shaft, the New York City private detective, played by Richard Read More

It’s probably only a matter of time before Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets franchise is adapted into a TV series, and when that day comes, Read More

The biggest fan complaint about 2014’s Godzilla reboot was that it didn’t feature enough Godzilla, and the new sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, seems determined to Read More

In a year when filmmakers Nicolas Pesce (Piercing) and Richard Shepard (The Perfection) have offered their own entertaining takes on the lurid Brian De Palma-style thriller, Read More

The main characters of Olivia Wilde’s highly entertaining feature directorial debut Booksmart are high school outcasts, awkward nerds who’ve spent their entire time in school focused Read More

For most dog movies, one tragic canine death is more than enough to tug on the audience’s heartstrings, but 2017’s A Dog’s Purpose crammed in four Read More

At two different screenings I attended at this year’s 10th annual TCM Classic Film Festival, the person introducing the film stopped to note that their explanation Read More

Fourteen-year-old Black-ish star Marsai Martin is the mastermind behind high-concept comedy Little, having first pitched the idea to Black-ish creator Kenya Barris when she was just Read More

Rock star Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss) is self-destructing even before Her Smell begins. Alex Ross Perry’s rock and roll epic opens with Becky’s band Something She Read More

The movies from animation studio Laika have never been big hits, but they’ve always been thoughtful and quirky and entirely distinctive from the sometimes overly similar Read More

Of all the animated classics that Disney has adapted into live-action (or at least photo-realistic) features, 1941’s Dumbo offers probably the loosest framework for a modern Read More

As the tapestry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe expands further and further, it has become increasingly difficult for individual films to carve out distinctive identities and Read More

The world of the first How to Train Your Dragon movie was exactly as fleshed-out as it needed to be to tell its simple story of Read More

Nobody expected The Lego Movie to be anything more than a feature-length toy commercial, so when Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 2014 animated film turned out Read More

The story of the early black metal scene in Norway is as much about violence and criminal activity as it is about music, and director and Read More

An aspiring serial killer meticulously plots his first premeditated murder, making detailed notes and plans for the killing and dismemberment of a prostitute, and yet when Read More