It’s tempting to pretend that Gene Hackman’s career ended with The Royal Tenenbaums. More than three decades after his breakout performance in Bonnie and Clyde, the actor is at his prickly best as Royal, an absentee father in the last act of his life who’s hoping to reconnect with the family...

Director Ari Aster’s goal with Hereditary wasn't to make a horror film - it's a family drama, first and foremost, portraying one family's tragedies, one after another, via known horror tropes. The results are even more frightening than the conventional horror effort. Annie Graham (a phenomenal...

Jonathan Lynn's comedy The Whole Nine Yards (2000), released 20 years ago this week, is a crime caper that draws much of its comedic energy from the clash of two different types of masculinity. We're used to this from the buddy cop genre and others like it, but Whole Nine Yards applied it to a...

"Before, I was alone. Now I'm not." - Honeymoon In The Tenant (1976), Roman Polanski's drunk Trelkovsky asks when, after cutting off so many limbs and appendages, he ceases to be himself: "If you cut off my head... would I say, 'Me and my head' or 'Me and my body'? What right has my head to...

Mrs. Bruce (Lin Shaye) comes down the stairs carefully holding a full glass of red wine. She rifles through her vinyl collection, selects one by The Carpenters, and gingerly places it on the record player. Reclining in her armchair, Mrs Bruce sips her massive glass of wine. Suddenly, unexpectedly,...

The Time: The mid-’90sThe Place: Downtown New York CityThe Setting: A nondescript warehouse/film studioThe Scene: “Ellen and Damian Kiss” When it arrives, the blow-up has been a long time coming. Ever since he showed up on the set of the indie film he’s agreed to be in, egotistical...

Based on my own research. Films included only if they played theatrically. Corrections and additions are welcome (@ me). For comparison’s sake, here are the 2018 and 2017 editions. Total wide releases (600+ theaters): 146 Sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, and franchises:...

The more I do this, the more it seems wrong to call these the "best" movies when I only saw a fraction of the entries. Well over 1,300 new films were released in the U.S. this year; I saw a couple hundred of them. And that's just the U.S.! So it should be "Best Movies Among Those I Watched, Which...

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There were countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the overlooked...

With over one hundred years separating World War I and the present day, cinema has consistently had to find new ways of depicting it for modern audiences who, unlike moviegoers in the first half of the 20th century, have no personal connection to it. Early films about World War I are defined by...

We had some of our regular contributors suggest movies from this year that flew under the radar or aren't getting enough end-of-the-year attention. Here they are, in alphabetical order: Climax The Death of Dick Long Fast Color Freaks Happy Death Day 2U Jawline Los Reyes...

One need only turn on CNN, check Twitter, or look to this year's Golden Globes nominations to see that the fragility of the male ego is at the front and center of the zeitgeist. That most stories are about men is, problematically, nothing new. What’s new is that their psyches are under the...

With all the big budget, heavily franchised stories of people with special powers (mutants, as they might uncharitably be called), it’s refreshing to see that it’s still possible to create a low budget, intimately crafted version of the same sort of story. Chloe (Lexy Kolker) is a young girl...

Starring Jack Quaid (son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid) and Maya Erskine, Plus One is a charming romantic comedy that has flown under the radar of many audiences but should be watched by all fans of the genre. Ben and Alice are the sort of old friends from college that have, for some reason, never...

The year had no shortage of talking animal movies — and might have even hit a nadir with the atrocious Lion King remake where Disney asked us to believe photorealistic African animals moved their mouths to form words like humans. There’s no forced dialogue or anthropomorphizing in Iván...