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…
Universal’s marketing department has been working overtime to sell the new romantic comedy Last Christmas as some sort of spiritual cousin to what is now apparently considered a modern-day holiday classic: Love, Actually. Remember Emma Thompson, who appeared in just one of that film’s myriad…
In the realm of unnecessary sequels, Stephen King’s follow-up novel to his beloved The Shining would seem to be running neck and neck for first place along with the movie adaptation of same. But Doctor Sleep comes for us all anyway, and believe it or…
Sarah Connor ostensibly changed the future and defeated Skynet in 1991, averting the cataclysm that would have been Judgment Day. But the Terminators and the Terminator movies never seem to stop, dragging these characters again and again into increasingly convoluted time-whiplash whirlpools, the same…
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…
Scott Aukerman’s Between Two Ferns: The Movie barely qualifies as a movie, in much the same way that Between Two Ferns barely qualifies as a TV show. The long running Funny or Die sketch featuring Zach Galifianakis as a hilariously inept local access celebrity…
