Halloween Kills is a smug bit of a ill-advised fan service with dull kills, sanctimonious plot beats, and little narrative progression. David Gordon Green’s 2018 take on John Carpenter’s seminal horror classic Halloween was not exactly the return to form many were hoping for when…
Dear Evan Hansen is a manipulative, unintentionally awkward musical plagued by a black hole of a lead character. Dear Evan Hansen makes a pretty strong case for the second biggest recent Broadway smash in the Hamilton world we all live in — yes, still…
Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman, freely adapted from a Clive Barker short story, is the tale of a white academic who inadvertently summons a murderous ghost, textually a manifestation of racial violence against Black men, but simultaneously a commentary on the fear of their…
Horror-comedy is one of the hardest cinematic lines to toe, but 1981’s An American Werewolf in London is perhaps the greatest existing instance of that alchemy. Not merely because it’s both really scary and really funny, but because it constantly makes counterintuitive choices —…
Old suffers a bit from Shyamalan’s weaknesses as a writer, but by its end, ranks as one of the director’s weirdest and most poignant works yet. If there’s a single unifying force behind the films of M. Night Shyamalan, it’s their outright insistence upon requiring…
During an interview with Jump Cut in 1976, director Monte Hellman described Two-Lane Blacktop as such: “It’s a film about inner life rather than outer life. But it’s not a film about other films; it’s not a pastiche.” The final caveat was in relation…
Against all odds, Family Business manages to be a wild, engaging sequel to the interminable original Boss Baby. Dreamworks Animation has always shown a penchant for producing would-be “edgy” family fare, the kinds of films that work overtime in presenting as kid-centric in their storytelling while…
The Forever Purge is suitably cynical and cathartic effort, righting some of the series’ previous wrongs and more bluntly tackling America’s systemic evils. Since James DeMonaco’s first film, The Purge series has found success in increasingly foregrounding its ideological concerns with each successive effort, making…
F9 continues the franchise’s downward trend, further garbling its outsized action and sentimentality into confectionery pap. What started as a scrappy gearhead ripoff of Point Break in 2001’s The Fast and the Furious has now become a lumbering, endless Saturday morning cartoon in F9: The…
Spike Lee’s 1991 Jungle Fever, a work with a title and subject matter seemingly designed to court — indeed, demand — controversy, is at its core a study of extreme contrasts. While Lee has been accused of a great many things during his four-decade…