Cry Macho is yet another late-career effort from Eastwood deconstructing his own legacy, neither his greatest such effort nor a throwaway piece. Just why does Clint Eastwood — who, in case you weren’t in the know, is now 91 years old and has expressed zero…
Malignant isn’t a start-to-finish success, but its final 30 minutes solidify it as one of the wildest, weirdest horror films in some time. In interviews and in marketing materials, Malignant is pitched as James Wan’s take on the Giallo, but while the director borrows elements…
With the release of last year’s conversational documentary Leap of Faith: In Conversation with William Friedkin, one thing has become abundantly clear — people are never going to stop talking about The Exorcist. Looking at the phenomenon through modern eyes, it might be easy…
Reminiscence is silly, arch, and derivative, an objective failure that nonetheless manages to entertain even as it induces eye rolls. It’s kind of fashionable these days to point out how movies (especially genre movies) not based on preexisting IP or part of a franchise are…
On the strength of Gunn’s outré humor and filmmaking sensibilities, The Suicide Squad is nothing less than the most enjoyable comic book flick in a quick minute. With David Ayer’s 2016 Suicide Squad being roundly considered an abject failure (despite heavy studio meddling) and the…
Space Jam 2 musters an engaging mid-film stretch, but it ultimately sinks under the weight of its overbearing corporate IP. Warner Brothers did their best to persuade Michael Jordan to sign on for Space Jam 2, following the box office success of the 1996…
How do you get away with the perfect murder? Easy: get someone else to do it for you. Such is the premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train, a taut, Dostoyevskyian exploration of moral ambiguity. Based on a novel by Patricia…
Director Alan J. Pakula helped usher in a decade of gritty, morally ambiguous New York thrillers with 1971’s Klute, a nervy neo-noir starring Donald Sutherland as John Klute, a small-town private detective who investigates the disappearance of a business executive named Tom Gruneman. Tom,…
In the Heights isn’t going to save the theatrical experience, but at 143 minutes, will help kill some time. In development since the musical made its Broadway debut (basically), a cinematic adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights arrives this week in the U.S.,…
This latest Conjuring effort displays a bit more awareness of precisely where its strengths lie, resulting in a lot of dumb fun for those happy to ride its low-stakes wavelength. James Wan might be the undisputed king of quiet-quiet-BANG horror, and his The Conjuring…
