Jerzy Skolimowski had a distinctive output well before he ended up in London. He began his film career in his native Poland with three…
Snake Eyes is all boring backstory and cliched tropes, and not remotely as weird as the material demands. Apparently, it’s absurdly hard to make…
If you love your action flicks stuffed full of nonsense exposition and explanation, Infinite is the film for you. You know you’re in trouble…
A Quiet Place Part II succeeds in much the same way as the original — as a sturdy, thoughtful, and understated exercise in genre. Box-office…
Georgetown isn’t the worst actor-turned-director debut feature, but it is a drab, superficial affair with little to distinguish it. Since coming to the attention of…
Sponge on the Run could have been a nostalgic charmer, but is instead little more than a bit of cheap brand marketing. After 22 years,…
A whopping 13 features deep into their cinematic partnership, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were reaching a new apex of open acrimony in their…
Dreamland is a beautiful, lite-Malickian effort than smartly boasts both gorgeous, mythopoeic expositions and thrilling storytelling. Set during the Great Depression and amidst the dusty…
Spontaneous tries to be too many things at once, and ultimately doesn’t scratch the surface of any of them. Spontaneous is a lot of…
In their 2015 documentary, De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow let iconoclastic writer/director Brian De Palma speak about each of his films, chronologically,…
“I’m not in the mood to get probed today.” “You think you’re worried? I’m not even wearing pants!” And so goes the humor of…
Gordon Parks’s 1971 Shaft is now almost 50 years old. The film didn’t begin the blaxploitation subgenre, but it was certainly its most popular…
Stephen King adaptations are as popular and generic as ever, despite claims of some kind of renaissance, and this latest iteration of Pet Sematary is hardly an…
It’s kind of hard to imagine that the multi-billion-dollar Transformers franchise has never previously leaned hard on nostalgia for the beloved ’80s toys and cartoon…
The Mission: Impossible series has gone from a gauzy star vehicle to a very referendum on said star as (to quote a character from the last movie) the “living…
The opening of of A Quiet Place leaves you primed for an arthouse-inflected genre film, like something A24 would release, or that Alex Garland might direct.…
Annihilation practically sits up and begs to be regarded as high-minded genre cinema. But really, it’s a thuddingly literal handful of barely engaged ideas and dangling…
It’s difficult to argue that Darren Aronofsky’s films are poorly executed, at least on a formal level; his largely allegorical works are often manic,…