Put simply, there’s a reason The War with Grandpa sat on the shelf for three years. Originally slated for release way back in ye olden times of…
Herself A patron of the British arts, Phyllida Lloyd’s transition from a director of theater to film could hardly have been more conspicuous. Her debut…
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…
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,…
Black Bear In the debate between mimesis and anti-mimesis, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear proffers a third possibility — that life is art in organic…
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…
Honest Thief is a lazy, cheap, and deeply stupid entry in the Liam Neeson crime cinema oeuvre. With Honest Thief we have yet another entry in…
On the Rocks “It must be very nice to be you.” That’s what Laura (Rashida Jones) says to her gadfly dad Felix (Bill Murray) late…
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…
Point and Line to Plane How does one give shape to one’s experience, one’s grief? The question persists through the films of Canadian director Sofia…
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…
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,…
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…
Mandibles Perhaps the most unbefitting title to arrive in the middle of a global pandemic, Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles defies the current for two reasons. That…
Another week, another festival. For this year’s BFI London Film Festival, it’s business as usual, which is to say the unusual business of 2020 film…
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…
With direct-to-video/streaming action films now a bonafide cottage industry with their own tropes, star filmmakers and performers, and aesthetic trappings, the real mediocrities are becoming…
The Wolf of Snow Hollow is yet further, winning proof of Jim Cummings’ singular artistic voice. Much like his debut feature, 2018’s Thunder Road, director-writer-actor Jim…
Where many festivals this year have had to get creative in their exhibition format, Nightstream has taken that industrious spirit to a new level —…
Trump Card was always going to be pathetic, but it surprises in demonstrating new lows of argumentation and cohesion from its soft-minded director. Dinesh D’Souza has,…
The Projectionist is a lovely elegy for the glory days of film exhibition, one that 2020 has brought into surprising focus. Since getting clean a few…