American Utopia provides a brief respite from reality and leaves the viewer hopeful for what’s to come. In the midst of the annus horribilis of 2020, with the US still being ravaged by a global pandemic, all manner of racial strife, a severe economic…
Nocturne, while imperfect and visually deficient, nonetheless represents the best yet of Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse collab. Part of the second batch of Blumhouse films premiering direct-to-streaming on Amazon, Nocturne, while far from perfect, at least shows what this distribution experiment could be capable…
A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is an old-school, family-friendly romp of pleasing, lightweight horror. Adapted from the eponymous trilogy of YA novels by Joe Ballarini, Rachel Talalay’s A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting is a zippy entry in Netflix’s Halloween catalog. Talalay’s credits include…
Dick Johnson is Dead forgoes potentially rich avenues of more universal concern, but remains a heartfelt portrait and preservation of the filmmaker’s father. Documentarian Kirsten Johnson is magnificent at integrating certain presentational modes — montage, time capsules — into works of memory preservation. She…
Evil Eye marks an improvement on the first wave of Welcome to the Blumhouse titles, but remains a mostly ineffective at developing either genre styling or any visceral power. Evil Eye, the latest release in Amazon’s exclusive Welcome to the Blumhouse film series, carries on…
Books of Blood is a little exploitative, quite a bit derivative, and overwhelmingly boring. There’s nary an original image or idea in Brannon Braga’s Books of Blood, but not simply because it’s an adaptation. Like most interpretations of Clive Barker’s work, this one plays fast…
The Forty-Year-Old Version deploys a charming lead but never manages to coalesce its many and varied influences. Within the relative glut of 21st-century hip hop cinema, The Forty-Year-Old Version is a curious fit. Unlike so many other such films, it’s not a biopic, and while…
Late career Adam Sandler thrives within Netflix’s low stakes, and Hubie Halloween is his most buoyant effort yet. For the better part of a decade, most highbrow types generally believed that Adam Sandler — and to a lesser extent, his stable of Happy Madison directors, producers,…
Garrett Bradley opts for vague generality rather than the specific and personal, robbing Time of some of its implicit power. From the western to the road movie, the legacy of the climactic homecoming looms large in American cinema, which is everywhere peopled by vagrants and…
Black Box is a lazy, boring, and self-serious entry in the Welcome to the Blumhouse project. The second feature in Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse film series, Black Box is ostensibly more of a horror film than the just-released The Lie. That said, a dude crab-walking…
