Neither the disasterpiece implied in its “wait, seriously?” premise nor an especially knowing or playful subversion of horror tropes, Bryce McGuire’s Night Swim is, for…
Filmmakers have been trying to figure out how to follow in the cloven hoof-steps of 1973’s zeitgeist-exploding The Exorcist almost since it was released, and,…
At first glance, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence seems to exist in opposition to its creator’s body of work. Directed and co-written by Nagisa Ôshima, an…
Few directors have embodied the ethos of their own films quite so fully as Robert Aldrich; fiercely independent, constantly navigating the fickle vicissitudes of a…
We’ve come a long way since Mister Ed. The central gimmick of Josh Greenbaum’s Strays, an R-rated comedy about a foursome of misfit dogs traveling…
Los Alamos, New Mexico: Apache country. Just a half-hour drive from Santa Fe, the land of Los Alamos was sparse but beautiful. The land hosts…
As far as film titles go, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken has to be one of the worst to swing out of Hollywood in many a…
What else is possibly left to say about the Fast & Furiouses? Fans excitedly devour each new installment with an oxymoronic combination of total earnestness…
Is there a greater rags-to-riches story than Charlie Chaplin’s? A real-life tramp, Chaplin grew up dirt poor on the streets of London. The son of…
If Stephanie Meyer ruined emo vampires for you, how about this slightly tweaked version, wherein a vampire’s familiar walks into a Codependents Anonymous meeting? That’s…
It has been 30 years since audiences were treated to a big-screen iteration of the beloved Nintendo video game series Super Mario Bros., with Bob…
Very loosely inspired by a colorful real-life incident that sadly didn’t end well for the animal in question, Cocaine Bear is a period horror-comedy that…
For many, M. Night Shyamalan has never come out from under the shadow of his mid-career flop, the seven-year stretch between 2006 and 2013 that…
An auteurist’s dream, the films of David Cronenberg have continued to express their creator’s psychosexual pet themes for half a century now, nearly without deviation.…
Welcome to the new world of genre cinema, where decades of low-budget sleaze and slime have been overtaken by PG-13-rated, eminently meme-able stuff that’s marginally…
Violent Night isn’t nearly as nuts as it needed to be, regrettably boasting both a confused tone and bloated length. It’s been a whopping 34…
The Fabelmans feels emotionally raw like little else Spielberg has made. Damn near every Steven Spielberg movie, in one sense or another, is about the…
She Said lends no depth to its leads and is an aesthetically anonymous work that fails to justify the big screen treatment. It has been…
Ticket to Paradise is an entirely charmless rom-com fronted by a poisonous couple and sleepwalking its way through bland genre tropes. How hard could it possibly…
Halloween Ends is a superior to film to Halloween Kills, and that’s essentially where the praise ends. Let’s be clear about one thing right off…
Bros is a would be rom-com lacking in comedy, chemistry, and untroubled rhetoric on gay culture. First off, the good news: director/co-writer Nicholas Stoller’s Bros is…