In this new Trump era of a Dice Clay President and bully pulpit bull, standup comedy has more relevancy than ever, at least in terms of Read More

The Great Wall is huge in China, and so is the movie of the same name. China is a rapidly emerging box office market and The Read More

Studio films rarely get as bonkers as A Cure for Wellness. While admirable for its audacity, Gore Verbinski’s stylish gothic horror throwback is plagued by a Read More

Fist Fight is marred by a very basic disconnect – it’s a movie with funny people that isn’t itself funny at all. So we are left Read More

As meta-mashup spin-offs go, The Lego Batman Movie is about as gleeful and bombastic as they come. Remarkable that a cinematic enterprise solely based on nothing Read More

The inevitable post-screening question regarding Fifty Shades Darker: “Is it better than the first one?” “No” is the answer, but not for any of the standard Read More

It’s only chapter two and the story of John Wick is getting stale. The 2014 film that introduced us to the legendary hitman established an appealing, Read More

As Stan Laurel once declared in Sons of the Desert, “Life’s not short enough.” The Space Between Us is a Disney Channel heart-beater between teens masquerading Read More

Mike Carey’s 2014 novel The Girl With All the Gifts was one of the most successful genre releases of that year, nominated for a number of Read More

The British thriller A Patch of Fog creates a great big feeling of deja vu. It tells a story that’s been told dozens of times before. The Read More

Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) was dead. And so was the franchise that killed him off, so it seemed, after the tepid response to 2005’s Diesel-less xXx: Read More

I’m a little torn on Split. The latest from M. Night Shyamalan contains intriguing concepts and two solid performances, though they feel a bit wasted in Read More

If Ben Affleck’s intent with Live by Night was to bridge the gap between his heretofore earthbound directorial filmography and his upcoming Batman blockbuster by wedging Read More

There is no greater mystery to man than faith. Finding the ability to believe in a higher power when reality constantly contradicts those ideals is at Read More

Few film characters are as broken as Lee Chandler. His seeming sedate life as a handy man today masks a past so horrible and hurtful that Read More

Paterson lives in the comfortable quiet of the everyday, the humdrum, unassuming spaces that make up the poetry of life. Makes sense, then, that it’s about Read More

The true-to-life sob story has been done to death. You know how it goes: Likable person faces peril, conflict, maybe illness. Person somehow overcomes said troubles Read More

What a film of magnificent contradictions Toni Erdmann is. Here’s a film of pristine simplicity drawn out to epic length. A looney comedy that burns very, Read More

The true story of African-American women who were critical minds at NASA in the ‘60s and well beyond feels especially timely at the end of 2016. Read More

James Stewart once told Peter Bogdanovich that films were “pieces of time.” Neither past, nor future, film is ever-present. In Mike Mills’s new film 20th Century Women, Read More