Movie Reviews
Little Women (2018)
(Full disclosure: The director of this film is the wife of a friend of mine, who is one of the producers. You shouldn't listen to anything I say about this or any other movie.)
Louisa May Alcott's beloved "Little Women" gets an update in this affe...
Hold the Dark
Continuing the "Wind River" cycle of movies about outsiders going to cold, sad Indian reservations to investigate tragedies, here's "Hold the Dark," another brutally chilling drama from "Green Room" director Jeremy Saulnier. Adapted by Saulnier's "B...
Smallfoot
"Smallfoot" is a light animated adventure set in a remote Himalayan village occupied by yetis, aka Abominable Snowmen (and Snowwomen), who have lived in isolation for generations. Though they have a complex societal hierarchy, the yetis are in many w...
Hell Fest
The rare slasher film that's not a sequel to or remake of a previous one, "Hell Fest" exploits the premise of a traveling Halloween carnival being infiltrated by an actual masked killer who avoids detection by blending in with the hired scarers. Dire...
The Old Man & the Gun
David Lowery's last movie, "A Ghost Story," was about a ghost but wasn't a horror film. His new one, "The Old Man and the Gun," is about a career bank robber but isn't a heist thriller. Lowery keeps you on your toes if you're a judge-a-movie-by-its-t...
The Sisters Brothers
See, they're a couple of brothers whose last name is Sisters. "The Sisters brothers." Get it? As a novel, much of what made "The Sisters Brothers" so entertaining was author Patrick DeWitt's amusingly dry way with words, his knack for turning a phras...
The House with a Clock in Its Walls
Jack Black opted out of the "Goosebumps" sequel in order to make "The House with a Clock in Its Walls," which is basically a "Goosebumps" movie but based on a different set of YA novels. Kids' movies are a good place for the cartoonish, rubbery actor...
Assassination Nation
“Assassination Nation,” based on the hashtags #woke and #metoo, is an in-your-face, self-consciously edgy satire about a town called Salem that goes witch-hunting after everyone's online accounts are hacked and their secrets (and nude pics) are expos...
Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart
(Screened at Fantastic Fest; release TBA)
We have Velvet Underground to thank for the title "Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart," but the movie of that name is from one Mickey Reece, an independent Oklahoma auteur who has made two dozen mov...
Savage (French)
(Screened at Fantastic Fest; release TBA)
Coming-of-age metaphors collide messily in "Savage" ("Les Fauves"), a weak-willed French drama by Vincent Mariette in which teenage Laura (Lily-Rose Depp), spending the summer with cousins at a campground,...
The Predator
Unlike the late entries in some horror franchises, "The Predator" doesn't pretend any of its predecessors didn't happen, but you don't need to have seen them, either. Directed and co-written by Shane Black (who was an actor in the original 1987 "Pred...
A Simple Favor
Based on Darcey Bell's novel, which must have been inspired by Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl," "A Simple Favor" is a funny, dark-edged, lurid mystery-melodrama starring Anna Kendrick as a naive stay-at-home mom named Stephanie Smothers who turns detecti...
Mandy
••• “Mandy” stars Nicolas Cage, with Andrea Riseborough as his wife, the two of them living a lumberjack’s life in the Pacific Northwest in 1983. Intercut with scenes of their idyllic existence, reading fantasy novels and talking about which planets...
White Boy Rick
It's unlikely (I hope) that the Wershe family of Detroit will remind you of your own clan. As portrayed in "White Boy Rick," a compelling if familiar fact-based drama set in 1984-88, the Wershes are low-class ignoramuses, the type of family where the...
The Nun
You know how sometimes a horror movie will have various creepy apparitions, and how it doesn't really matter why those particular images were chosen, the point is just to be creepy? But then you know how sometimes a horror movie makes a lot of money,...
Peppermint
In yet another "Death Wish" update teaching the valuable lesson that violence is the answer, "Peppermint" presents Jennifer Garner as Riley North, a Los Angeles woman who seeks revenge after her husband (Jeff Hephner) and little girl (Cailey Fleming)...
Cold Skin
•••
"Cold Skin" starts with the Nietzsche quote about how monster-hunters must beware lest they become monsters themselves, staring into the abyss may result in the abyss staring back at you, yada yada. It's pretty on-the-nose for the story that ...
Operation Finale
As we've seen, the end of Adolf Hitler didn't mean the end of the Nazis. Those suckers are hardy! "Operation Finale" recounts how one of the Naziest of the Nazis, Adolf Eichmann, was found hiding in Buenos Aires in 1960 and captured by Israeli Mossad...
Arizona
"Arizona" is a dark horror/comedy set after the housing collapse in 2009, an era that ought to have inspired more dark horror/comedies than it has. It stars Rosemarie DeWitt as a divorced mom in an Arizona suburb who’s about to lose her house while s...
Searching
When teenage Margot (Michelle La) goes missing, her widowed father, David (John Cho), with whom she has always enjoyed a close relationship, realizes he doesn't actually know any of her friends and has no idea where to start looking. Thus "Searching"...
The Happytime Murders
"The Happytime Murders" is a dismal execution of a great premise, in which puppets (think Muppets) live alongside humans in Los Angeles as second-class citizens, the way toons and people did in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." When the felt cast members of...
A.X.L.
"A.X.L.," a wholesome boy-and-his-dog adventure and an inoffensive PG trifle, is patterned after "The Iron Giant" -- a good role model for any movie to emulate, though obviously a hard one to measure up to. It also has shades of "Short Circuit," "E.T...
Papillon
"Papillon" is based on the memoirs of Henri Charrière, a 1930s French safecracker who was sent to an inescapable penal colony from which he subsequently (spoiler alert) escaped. But it's also based on the 1973 film version of those memoirs (screenwri...
Mile 22
Peter Berg, director of good movies like "Friday Night Lights" and "The Rundown," has fallen in with a bad crowd lately, and that crowd's name is Mark Wahlberg. After an auspicious start with "Lone Survivor," each of their subsequent collaborations -...
Alpha
They don't make a lot of movies that are set in 18,000 B.C. and told entirely in made-up caveman languages, perhaps for obvious reasons. Nor is the theme of "where dogs came from" often explored in film, though that angle sounds a lot more lucrative....
We the Animals
All is tranquil at the beginning of "We the Animals" before it evolves into a gentle, aching coming-of-age story for 10-year-old Jonah (Evan Rosado), who will soon learn that you have to take the moments of joy wherever you can find them. Up till now...
Crazy Rich Asians
There are two things about "Crazy Rich Asians" that separate it from most romantic comedies. One is that it's good. Based on Kevin Kwan's bestselling novel and directed by John M. Chu ("Step Up 2: The Streets," "Now You See Me 2"), it uses one of the...
The Meg
Like most action movies, "The Meg" begins with its tough-guy hero (who is the best of the best at what he does) performing a mission that goes awry, causing him to blame himself, quit the business, and feel haunted. Then it's a few years later and we...
Summer of 84
••• "Summer of 84" is by the trio of Canadian directors -- François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, known collectively as RKSS (Roadkill Superstars) -- who made "Turbo Kid," a daffy, post-apocalyptic, '80s-style "futuristic" adventu...
Slender Man
Even by the low standards of lame PG-13 horror movies about teenage girls being harassed by supernatural entities, "Slender Man" is quite bad. Based on a folkloric boogeyman created in 2009 for an internet contest, this aimless turd has New England h...
Dog Days
You know those Garry Marshall ensemble comedies like "Mother's Day" and "New Year's Eve," where various strangers' lives intersect around a particular theme? "Dog Days" is like that, only not terrible! Not great, either, but it's sunny and tame and a...
The Darkest Minds
With basic-cable production values and an exceedingly generic story, "The Darkest Minds" is the latest teenage dystopian fantasy film based on a trilogy of young adult novels in which a girl learns she is Very Special and becomes a leader in the figh...
Christopher Robin
Disney's "Christopher Robin" is not a biography of Christopher Robin Milne, the boy featured in his father A.A.'s "Winnie-the-Pooh" books. There was a movie last year, "Goodbye, Christopher Robin," that told that story (more or less). This Disney ver...
The Spy Who Dumped Me
The two main characters in "The Spy Who Dumped Me" are ordinary women who get caught up in international espionage and turn out to be -- what are the odds? -- pretty good at it. They shoot villains with relative ease and accuracy, instinctively hide ...
Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (documentary)
"Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood" is the movie version of the 2012 memoir "Full Service," in which George Albert "Scotty" Bowers shared juicy details about his decades-long pimping for Tinseltown celebrities. Shot by director Matt Tyrnauer...
Mission: Impossible — Fallout
Tom Cruise has been starring in "Mission: Impossible" movies for 22 years, and his character, un-killable super-spy Ethan Hunt, has been on the job for about the same length of time. Hunt isn't an archetype like James Bond, kept forever young(-ish) b...
Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
"Teen Titans Go! To the Movies," the very meta big-screen adaptation of the Cartoon Network series "Teen Titans Go!," is about a quintet of adolescent superheroes seeking to earn the same respect their adult counterparts get by doing what so many of ...
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
"Mamma Mia!" was a badly written headache based on a badly written live musical, adapted for the screen by the same people who had staged it on Broadway, who leaned on the show's built-in fanbase like a crutch. (No reason to improve something that's ...
The Equalizer 2
At the end of "The Equalizer" (2014), you probably thought everything that needed equalizing had been taken care of. Wrong, dummy! "The Equalizer 2" has non-equalized things up the wazoo, just waiting for Denzel Washington to equalize them. He usuall...
Unfriended: Dark Web
"Unfriended: Dark Web" has no connection to 2015's "Unfriended" except that they adhere to the same format: Both unfold in real time entirely on someone's computer screen via their Skype sessions, Facebook chats, and so forth. This structure, a refle...
Blindspotting
“Blindspotting” is an explosive racial comedy, a love letter to Oakland, and a jumpstart to the movie career of its star, Daveed Diggs, who co-wrote the screenplay with co-star Rafael Casal. Directed by first-timer Carlos Lopez Estrada, the film is s...
Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana (documentary)
Owing to the slippery definition of the word and our robust (for the time being) First Amendment, it takes a lot to get arrested for "obscenity" in America, let alone actually convicted. A few performers and publishers have been, with famous names li...
Skyscraper
How you gonna hire one-legged Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to inspect the safety features of your spectacular new Hong Kong high-rise, then let bad guys set the building on fire and threaten The Rock's family? You think one-legged Dwayne "The Rock" John...
Eighth Grade
Bo Burnham, the first YouTube comedian to leverage his online fame into a mainstream career, is 27 years old and a boy. Yet he has somehow written and directed "Eighth Grade," a marvelously, horrifically authentic dramedy about an awkward and shy 13-...
The Night Eats the World (French)
••• "The Night Eats the World" ("La nuit a dévoré le monde") has a different mood from most zombie films, which proves to be refreshing. It's less mayhem-oriented, quieter, more drama than horror (though not without its horror), with a compelling ce...
Sorry to Bother You
It would seem rapper and activist Boots Riley watched a few Michel Gondry movies ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Be Kind Rewind," etc.) and decided to make a whimsical, alternate-reality satire of his own. It's called "Sorry to Bother You,...
Ant-Man and the Wasp
As those still weeping over "Avengers: Infinity War" will tell you between muffled sobs, there's big doin's afoot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But none of that matters in "Ant-Man and the Wasp," a direct sequel to "Ant-Man" that's just as cheerf...
The First Purge
The question we had when "The Purge" came out in 2013 was: Wait, how does this work? In this near-future version of America, there's a 12-hour period set aside each year during which all crime is legal. The result of this planned anarchy is that over...
Uncle Drew
"Uncle Drew," a basketball comedy directed by Charles Stone III ("Drumline," "Mr. 3000"), ought to be about the title character, a septuagenarian who was the best street-ball player in New York in 1968 before flaming out and disappearing. Played by N...
Leave No Trace
Debra Granik's third film, "Leave No Trace," is like her first two -- "Down to the Bone" (2004) and "Winter's Bone" (2010) -- in that it's about a resourceful female facing difficult odds in an isolated, chilly location. But where the others were ble...
Sicario: Day of the Soldado
In "Sicario: Day of the Soldado," the grim, unpleasant sequel to the 2015 film that grappled with the morality of the drug war, there is no more grappling. What was once an ethical quagmire is now a harmless mud bath, wallowed in by swaggering, non-i...
The Catcher Was a Spy
"The Catcher Was a Spy" begins with onscreen titles telling us that after the Nazis split the atom and put Dr. Heisenberg on the job of developing a bomb, the U.S. sent a Jewish baseball player-turned-spy to assassinate him. Color us intrigued! Alas,...
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Bad news, everyone: dinosaurs are boring now. People were so preoccupied with whether they could make a fifth "Jurassic Park" movie, they didn't stop to think if they should. "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom," a direct sequel to 2015's passable but fa...
Incredibles 2
When "The Incredibles" came out, in November 2004, it was Pixar's sixth movie and only about the ninth superhero movie in the modern era (which archeologists agree started with "X-Men" in 2000). Focused more on adventure than comedy, with bar-raising...
Tag
"Tag" turns an outrageous-yet-true story into one that's just outrageous, with details that couldn't possibly be true. Based on a 2013 Wall Street Journal article, it's about five men in their late 30s who've been playing the same game of Tag since g...
SuperFly
"SuperFly," a modern-day remake of the 1972 blaxploitation classic -- about a successful cocaine dealer of color who wants to get out of the business -- is a straight crime drama, made by a music video director but not shot like a music video. It's n...
Hereditary
Would you like to watch Toni Collette have a nervous breakdown for two hours? "Hereditary" is many things -- a haunting story about a disintegrating family, a masterfully directed nightmare by first-timer Ari Aster, a pants-besoiling horror film -- b...
Hearts Beat Loud
With a hint of wistfulness to give it some weight, "Hearts Beat Loud" is a happy, sunshiny movie about saying goodbye, letting go, and collaborating with loved ones to make sick beats. It stars Nick Offerman as Frank Fisher, a widowed record-shop own...
Ocean’s Eight
Remember how Danny Ocean needed 10 friends (and then 11, and then 12) to pull off his heists? In "Ocean's Eight," his sister, Debbie (Sandra Bullock), only needs six collaborators (plus a seventh, eventually, as spoiled by the title) to perpetrate an...
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (documentary)
I didn't grow up with "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" (or "Sesame Street," for that matter). We didn't have cable yet when I was that age, and our TV antenna didn't pick up the local PBS affiliate. Yet even without a personal connection or a sense of n...
Hotel Artemis
The "John Wick" movies have a hotel, The Continental, that's exclusively for assassins, where a code of conduct (e.g., no "working" on the premises) is strictly enforced. So fascinating is the society hinted at (they even use their own currency) that...
Adrift
Remember the Robert Redford movie "All Is Lost," where he was stranded at sea? "Adrift," with teen-romance veterans Shailene Woodley ("The Fault in Our Stars") and Sam Claflin ("Me Before You") lost in the Pacific on a storm-damaged yacht, is like th...
Action Point
If the absence of Johnny Knoxville's "Jackass" has left a concussion-shaped hole in your life, it may be partially filled by "Action Point," a juvenile comedy with Knoxville as the owner of a rickety amusement park who tries to compete with a fancy n...
The Texture of Falling
At the risk of making it sound more interesting than it is, "The Texture of Falling" is a lurid, Portland-set meta-drama about a timid filmmaker named Louisa (Julie Webb) who starts dating a dull married pianist, Luke (Patrick D. Green), while trying...
Upgrade
"Upgrade" is an offbeat futuristic techno-thriller in the tradition of B-movies about scientists tampering in God's domain, made with enthusiasm (by "Saw" and "Insidious" creator Leigh Whannell) from the spare parts of other sci-fi stories. It has so...
American Animals
"This is not based on a true story," say the onscreen titles at the beginning of "American Animals." "This is a true story." A bold assertion, but writer-director Bart Layton, whose previous film was the unbelievably engrossing documentary “Impostor,...
Solo: A Star Wars Story
While I've always liked the original "Star Wars" trilogy, I don't have the depth of knowledge (i.e., memorization) that some do, so there are probably references in the Han Solo prequel, "Solo: A Star Wars Story," that I didn't catch. That's besides ...
Deadpool 2
What distinguishes Deadpool from most other superheroes is that he swears, kills people, and breaks the fourth wall. That is also, of course, what distinguished the first "Deadpool" film from its dozens of siblings way back in 2016. "Deadpool 2" grap...
On Chesil Beach
Ian McEwan's novel "On Chesil Beach" and the movie based on it (which he also wrote) tell a story set in 1962 England that could only work as a period piece, for it is based on the premise that society expects newlyweds to be virgins, and that many o...
Book Club
The imaginatively titled "Book Club," about four women in their late 60s whose love lives are rekindled by reading the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy, sounds like an extended advertisement for the books, but it really isn't. It's just the catalyst fo...
Life of the Party
You'll think you've seen "Life of the Party" before, or at least something very much like it: A dowdy, newly divorced mom goes back to college to finish her degree -- and it's the same college her daughter is attending! Collision course with wackines...
Revenge
••• The rape-revenge sub-genre has many entries, and everything about "Revenge" (including the title) sounds derivative until you get to the credits. How many movies on this topic were written and directed by women? This one, a cool, synth-scored em...
Breaking In
This week's "good enough, I guess, if you're not too picky" home-invasion thriller is "Breaking In," which offers the innovative twist of the bad guys getting inside and holding the kids captive while the mom is locked outside and has to "break in," ...
RBG (documentary)
Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg started to become a pop-culture icon a few years ago, when the court shifted rightward and she found herself writing more dissents -- scathing ones, often, on subjects that America was newly (re-)interested i...
Bad Samaritan
There are two premises in "Bad Samaritan," one that drives the plot and one that explains the villain's motives. They are middling premises, better than some you've heard, less creative than others. They're executed with average skill by director Dea...
Overboard
Any remake of the 1987 Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell "romantic" "comedy" "Overboard" would have to reverse the genders. A single father of three rowdy boys tricking a rich, mean amnesiac woman into believing she's his wife -- that is to say, cook, nanny, ...
Tully
Diablo Cody's screenwriting career started with a pregnant teenager named Juno. She returns to the subject of maternity with "Tully," but there's a crucial difference this time: Cody has three kids of her own now, an experience that informs her painf...
Let the Sunshine In (French)
"Let the Sunshine In," the latest film by French auteur Claire Denis ("Beau Travail," "35 Shots of Rum"), is made for two groups of people: fans of Claire Denis's elliptical, even baffling style; and fans of Juliette Binoche who want to see the actre...
Avengers: Infinity War
You can go crazy trying to understand the thinking of people who make and sell Hollywood blockbusters, but what they've done with "Avengers: Infinity War" is fascinating. It was filmed concurrently with its own sequel (due 52 weeks from now), and the...
Super Troopers 2
Experience has taught us not to get our hopes up about long-awaited sequels, especially sequels to films whose charms were obscure or quirky to begin with. (It's hard enough to catch regular lightning twice, let alone cult-favorite lightning.) "Super...
I Feel Pretty
There are some good ideas and thoughtful insights buried in the very messy "I Feel Pretty," a comedy about female self-image that is unsure of its own identity. Directed by screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, the duo behind such mediocritie...
Traffik
You can tell "Traffik" is a serious movie about scary things because it's spelled with a "k." "Traffic," who cares? But "traffik"?? Watch out! Written and directed by Deon Taylor ("Meet the Blacks"), this lurid, clumsy thriller is 30 minutes old befo...
Truth or Dare
It's laudable to convert harmless childhood games into horror premises, but "Truth or Dare" does it with such rote blandness that the movie is actually less suspenseful than a real game of truth or dare. Directed by Jeff Wadlow ("Cry_Wolf," "Kick-Ass...
Rampage
"Rampage" is one of the better video-game-based movies, a low bar that it clears only by forsaking the entire premise of the game. The mid-80s arcade hit had one objective: with a giant gorilla, giant lizard, or giant wolf as your avatar, you destroy...
The Rider
Chloe Zhao was born in Beijing and is not a cowgirl, but "The Rider," which she wrote and directed, could hardly feel more authentic if she'd grown up among the hardscrabble South Dakotans it portrays. No doubt it helps to have real rodeo riders play...
Beirut
Few actors are better suited to play a diplomat than Jon Hamm, and the erstwhile Don Draper brings his gregarious A-game to "Beirut," a compelling espionage flick directed by Brad Anderson ("The Machinist," "Session 9") and written by Tony Gilroy ("M...
Blockers
It is a time-honored tradition that teens in movies make pacts with one another to lose their virginity, but seldom are those teens female girls of the young lady gender! That makes "Blockers" different from the typical raunch-com -- that, and the fa...
Chappaquiddick
Based on the infamous 1969 incident in which a young woman drowned after a probably-drunk Sen. Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge into a pond, "Chappaquiddick" is unusual for a docudrama in that its point of view is different from its main charac...
A Quiet Place
As a proponent of the "shut up and watch the movie" school of thought, I have a special fondness for films that actively encourage silence. The tense and thrilling "A Quiet Place" does it by putting its characters in a situation where making noise is...
You Were Never Really Here
Some movies provide so much vivid detail about a character that you could practically write a biography. Lynne Ramsay's mesmerizing "You Were Never Really Here" (based on Jonathan Ames' novel) is a different sort of experience, immersing us in impres...
Ready Player One
"Ready Player One" is set in a future where people spend most of their time in a virtual-reality world called OASIS that allows them to play games and have adventures in whatever fictional settings and with whatever fictional characters they choose (...
Ismael’s Ghosts (French)
There are no literal hauntings in "Ismael's Ghosts," a wry, lyrical, but often plodding drama from director Arnaud Desplechin ("A Christmas Tale"), only metaphorical ones. Freewheeling French filmmaker Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), who shares De...
Pacific Rim Uprising
You remember, of course, how a breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean produced a gateway through which extra-dimensional Godzillas entered our universe and wrecked our cities, and the only way to stop the destruction was to build giant Transformer...
Sherlock Gnomes
You know what happens when you come up with the title first and then try to build a movie around it? You get uninspired nonsense like "Sherlock Gnomes," a sequel to "Gnomeo & Juliet," which I didn't see but which I assume was also uninspired nons...
Unsane
Steven Soderbergh's latest film, the shrewd, exasperating psychological thriller "Unsane," is one of his experimental projects, shot entirely on an iPhone. It looks awful -- harsh, garish, cheap, like he didn't even use a new iPhone. The shots are ni...
7 Days in Entebbe
Hijacking an airplane was trendy in the 1970s, and evidently not very hard. The incident recreated in "7 Days in Entebbe," from 1976, was at least the 40th hijacking of the decade, perpetrated by two Palestinians and two German revolutionaries hoping...
Love, Simon
"Love, Simon" is the first film about a gay teenager's coming out ever distributed in wide release by a major studio. We've seen mainstream films with queer youth as supporting characters, and numerous coming-out-centered films that played the arthou...
Tomb Raider
Say what you will about the new "Tomb Raider," it shows a tomb being raided less than 20 minutes after it starts. It's actually a false tomb with a secret room hidden under it, and it's not raided so much as unlocked with a key, but we're counting it...
I Can Only Imagine
First recorded in 1999, MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine" is the best-selling, most-played contemporary Christian song since the invention of the radio, written by a Texan named Bart Millard who fell into singing and songwriting after a high school inju...
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," first published in 1962, is one of the most beloved young adult novels not to have already been turned into a movie (except for a 2003 TV version that nobody, least of all L'Engle, liked), so Disney's new big-...
