This British film set on the island of Jersey is a stunning feature debut by Michael Pearce. Jessie Buckley plays Moll, a young woman with a history of antisocial behavior. Her wealthy family is protective but judgmental. Molly ditches her own birthday party to go drinking, and when a drunken lout...

“Whiteness can incinerate a family with the heat equal to a bomb,” intones narrator Travis Wilkerson, the filmmaker and subject of Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? “Give it enough time and whiteness will incinerate the world.” On its face, the documentary serves as a recounting of...

In a year that gave us The 15:17 to Paris and Gotti, the claim that the most heinous cinematic crime committed in 2018 was the trailer to Alpha is a bold one. However, it’s a bold one I stand by, because whoever made the decision that this brutal and beautiful survival drama should be marketed as...

Rather than acting as a release valve on the past few years, 2018 continued to increase the pressure, as American culture grows steadily more hostile and volatile. During such turbulent times, satiric genre films that hold up a mirror to society are typically not favorably received — the closer...

If there was ever something to make me realize that pasty dudes talking about movies on Twitter wasn’t indicative of the rest of the world, it would be how few people know about, and have seen, Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road, a movie with so much spunk and fervor that it feels straight out of the...

The Mark Duplass-produced Unlovable is a refreshingly honest depiction of a woman's road to recovery from sex addiction, based on writer and star Charlene deGuzman’s own struggles. DeGuzman radiates with effervescence as the aptly named Joy, a thoroughly unique heroine with childlike pigtails who...

Two teenage girls, one a self-admitted sociopath, the other a spoiled schemer, conspire to commit murder in Cory Finley’s brilliantly incisive Thoroughbreds. It’s hard to tell whether the fragile Amanda (Olivia Cooke) and the self-assured Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) are ever truly friends, or...

This year saw a phoenix-like rebirth of the elemental spirit we call Nicolas Cage, with the actor rising from the ashes of Z-grade Redbox fare into the gonzo genre freakout of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy. A few months before his much heralded return, however, us Cage disciples witnessed his second...

In the midst of his Elisabeth Moss trilogy (consisting of Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth, and Her Smell), indie auteur Alex Ross Perry marshaled his largest ensemble to date in Golden Exits. A contemporary comedy/drama centered on a cluster of self-centered Brooklynites, the film finds Perry...

In an alternate (and, frankly, better) universe, Augustine Frizzell’s Never Goin’ Back would have been one of the biggest comedy hits of 2018, with star-making performances from Maia Mitchell and Camila Morrone. Instead, Frizzell’s hilarious, heartfelt, and often beautiful stoner comedy...

In The Favourite, Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) stuffs a piece of cake into her face, then promptly vomits it back into a bucket. Despite this setback, she continues to eat it. Her favorite, childhood friend and lover Sarah (Rachel Weisz), is not afraid to point out that the Queen of England is stupid...

It’s fitting that the most iconic image from the films of David Cronenberg is the exploding head from Scanners (1981). Cronenberg’s stories contain so many complex ideas and themes that any single attempt to wrap one’s head around them seems a risky prospect. And yet, the popular consensus...

Superman (called Superman: The Movie in advertising) was released on Dec. 15, 1978, but it was supposed to come out in June to coincide more closely with the 40th anniversary of the big guy's April 1938 comic book debut. Buried in that factoid is the realization that Superman: The Movie is now as...

Christmas stories and tales of space exploration both appeal to an audience’s sense of wonder, so it’s only natural that filmmakers have occasionally gone to both wells simultaneously. There’s a world of difference, however, between crass kiddie fare like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians...

According to Hollywood lore and its IMDb trivia page, Twins was dreamt up during a desperate bathroom break by two writers whose only prepared pitch had just been shot down. I can’t find a credible source for that, but do I really need one? Have you seen Twins? Have you seen the poster for...