Madres hardly justifies the whole Blumhouse/Amazon deal, but it’s at least the best of the eight films that have come courtesy of it. Director Ryan Zaragoza’s Madres is undoubtedly the best of the second wave of Amazon/Blumhouse movies released this month, and arguably the best of any…
The Manor isn’t necessarily a good film, but it’s a fun enough lite-horror outing that reflects an improvement from the Blumhouse/Amazon team-up. The law of averages dictates that it was bound to happen, but it still comes as a bit of a shock that the…
Black as Night is a remarkably dull vampire flick riddled with awful centrist politics. Part of the second wave of Blumhouse castoffs that have been repackaged and dumped onto Amazon Prime streaming (the first batch arrived this time last year), Maritte Lee Go’s Black as Night…
Bingo Hell is at least a horror film unlike last year’s Amazon/Blumhouse offerings, but is too full of questionable craftsmanship and hollow messaging to recommend. The title Bingo Hell is a play on the phrase bingo hall, which anyone with a half a brain cell…
Birds of Paradise benefits from gorgeous compositions and dreamy direction, but it never quite reaches the heights its artful pirouetting suggests. On paper, Sarah Adina Smith’s Birds of Paradise seems like a film where nothing should really work, one whose premise can promise only an…
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a reductive, self-congratulatory musical that deeply cheapens its real-life subject. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie…everybody, that is, except Amazon Studios, who have done little in the way of promoting a film they spent a great deal to acquire from Disney/Fox earlier…
Cinderella has exactly one idea to distinguish it, and it’s a bad one. 2021’s latest interpretation of the Cinderella fairy tale comes courtesy of Pitch Perfect mastermind Kay Cannon (here directing) and is based on an “original idea” from James Corden. It’s unclear what this…
Thrice Upon a Time is yet another bold, challenging, pathos-filled apocalyptic plunge into the human psyche. Hideaki Anno is doing it all over again. No, not in a literal sense: any longtime Evangelion fan knows full well by now how little the animator ever…
Annette is somehow both Carax’s weirdest and safest film, a letdown even as its vision remains bold. One-time enfant terrible Leos Carax, foremost contemporary purveyor of l’amour fou, the missing link between the nouvelle vague and the cinema du look, fervent admirer of Stallone’s…
Jolt is an ironically-titled dud, its rote thriller stylings utterly unervating. Tanya Wexler’s Jolt is like a fake movie playing on the television in a better, but probably still mediocre movie. It’s a cheap but slick product, nothing but a piece of content used to…
