News of the World is a film of dangerously naïve messaging, erratic pacing, limited stakes, and little formal or technical craft to otherwise distract from such weaknesses. The Western was arguably the most popular genre in the world from roughly 1910 until the 1960s,…
All My Life adopts the familiar form of any number of tragic romances without building any depth into its vision. Jessica Rothe is undoubtedly one of the most promising young actresses working in film today. Her calling card is the particular brand of charm and…
Freaky is a playful and genuinely funny ’90s slasher revamp that boasts both surprising commentary and appropriately gnarly kill thrills. There’s a lot to like about director Christopher Landon’s latest feature, Freaky, in which a bullied high schooler named Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) swaps bodies…
Judd Apatow has built and padded his filmography on a basic principle: construct vehicles for comic actors in the early days of their ascending stardom – Steve Carrell in The 40-Year Old Virgin, Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (the outlier…
After a six month delay resulting from various media outlets labelling the film, sight unseen, as “dangerous Liberal propaganda,” Craig Zobel’s horror-comedy The Hunt finally makes its way to theaters. In an inspired move, producer Jason Blum took a page out of the William…
From the 1933 original to Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, the cinematic iterations of Invisible Men have generally dealt with how a lack of accountability tends to bring out the worst in people, and they typically grant already somewhat sociopathic or narcissistic male characters with…
Arguably the most indelible Broadway show of all time, it might be surprising that Cats took nearly forty years to be turned into a movie. At least until you see the movie they made. The King’s Speech’s Tom Hooper has put away the 18mm…
A Tinder date between the two title characters in Queen & Slim (Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya, respectively) goes horribly wrong after they get pulled over by a cop (Sturgill Simpson, weirdly) so cartoonishly racist that he draws his gun when Slim mentions that…
Universal’s marketing department has been working overtime to sell the new romantic comedy Last Christmas as some sort of spiritual cousin to what is now apparently considered a modern-day holiday classic: Love, Actually. Remember Emma Thompson, who appeared in just one of that film’s myriad…
Ever since Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson entered the franchise with Fast Five, the Fast & Furious films have increasingly distanced themselves from their now-quaint LA street-racing roots, becoming instead gigantic international caper films that have the characters shooting missiles at submarines from muscle cars.…
