Having original “final girl” Laurie Strode return to the Halloween franchise after decades away is not a new idea, although given the underwhelming way it turned Read More

Ophelia is one of Hamlet‘s most vital characters — and, in the eyes of Ophelia the movie — one of its most misunderstood. Director Claire McCarthy uses Lisa Read More

The song in The Song of Sway Lake is an actual song, a custom composition for the Sway family that becomes the source of an intergenerational Read More

First Man opens with an enthralling sequence in which a young Neil Armstrong makes a perilous ascent into the outer atmosphere as an X-15 test pilot. Through Read More

Family Thanksgivings are always awkward, but especially so when the traditional familial arguments descend into a violent showdown with rogue Homeland Security agents. So unfolds the Read More

Maggie Gyllenhaal is great at making audiences uncomfortable. Even in her more sedate, straightforward roles, there’s often a sense of something off-kilter and unstable, and she’s Read More

In this particular comic book boom in cinema history, when superhero adaptations are almost stubbornly efficient in terms of both frequency and relative quality, it’s almost Read More

There’s a disconnect between what A Star is Born truly is and what it feels like it needs to be. Said disconnect doesn’t hinder the film from Read More

As brutal and unyielding as the violence is in Jeremy Saulnier’s acclaimed movies Blue Ruin and Green Room, it’s generally contained and matter-of-fact, the product of Read More

Night School is interesting as a movie-going experience, insomuch as it barely resembles one, yet I was hard-pressed to leave the theater offended by that fact. There Read More

It’s a shame that the Tim Burton of 25 years ago wasn’t able to travel forward in time to direct The House With a Clock in Read More

The Predator spends too much of its time hunting for ways to bring several uninteresting plot strings together and not nearly enough indulging in its throwback Read More

At first glance, Paul Feig doesn’t seem like the right choice to direct a stylish mystery thriller. But the man behind crowd-pleasing comedies including Bridesmaids, Spy Read More

Peppermint opens with a claustrophobic white-knuckle sequence of blunt force brutality – Jennifer Garner, its headlining star, swiftly and nearly wordlessly kicking the ass of a Read More

It’s no surprise that directing brothers Josh and Jonathan Baker expanded Kin from a short film (their 2014 effort Bag Man), because there clearly isn’t enough Read More

Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov has been quietly building a niche for himself as the producer of a subgenre of movies he dubs “screen life,” including the Read More

The easiest way to process the abject failure of The Happytime Murders is to know that those Taco Bell “nacho fries” commercials are more successful conceptually than Read More

In this particular Hollywood era, one so dominated by monolithic tent poles and so fueled by familiarity as a box-office catalyst that even minor fringe hits Read More

When Bing Liu first started shooting footage for what became his debut documentary feature Minding the Gap, there’s no way he could have known what he Read More

Spike Lee’s vital importance to the history and progression of American independent cinema lies in his boldness. It’s a boldness of suppression finally set free, of Read More