OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted to current domestic…
A Tinder date between the two title characters in Queen & Slim (Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya, respectively) goes horribly wrong after they get pulled over by a cop (Sturgill Simpson, weirdly) so cartoonishly racist that he draws his gun when Slim mentions that…
For some inexplicable reason, Netflix seems to have set its sights on reviving the early-to- mid 90’s boom of erotic thrillers, old-fashioned melodramas mixed with vague neo-noir trappings and done up with a patina of sex and slick, gauzy cinematography (think anything with Rebecca…
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is an early entry in what’s now a sprawling, multimedia franchise that includes TV, video games, and graphic novels. But James Cameron’s film feels as bracing and exhilarating today as it did upon its release almost thirty years ago. The…
At this point, the Disney live action remake is a fact of life, a part of the current moviegoing landscape as ubiquitous as superheroes and unwanted remakes. So far, their quality has ranged from solid (Cinderella) to unnecessary (The Lion King) to dreadful (Aladdin).…
Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, based on Jonathan Lethem’s novel, is by Norton’s own admission a passion project some 20 years in the making. It’s easy to see what would attract Norton to the role of Lionel Essrog, a sorta-kinda private detective investigating his boss and…
Though he didn’t invent it, James Mangold so perfected the Hollywood biopic/true story template with Walk the Line that they made a beat-for-beat parody of it in Walk Hard, so he might as well have. In Ford v Ferrari, he aims that factory efficiency…
Playing out with an advocacy doc’s briskness and efficiency of exposition rather than a suspenseful chronicle of investigative journalism, Scott Z. Burns’ The Report is closer to something like Spotlight than the more formally aggressive and elegant All the President’s Men or Zodiac. And…
The Irishman tells the probably-not-entirely-true story of Robert DeNiro’s Frank Sheeran, using cutting-edge visual effects technology to place him inside some of the most important events in American history, right next to a lot of famous people, many of whom wind up dead. It’s…
Ever since his 2003 debut, House of 1000 Corpses, Rob Zombie has used cinema to engage the paradox of counter-cultural extremity and populism. Raised as a child of the seventies – who saw violent episodes unfold in his family’s travelling carnival – Zombie built…
