Blood on Her Name opens with a scene of intense immediacy. A young woman stands above a man’s corpse lying in a pool of blood on the concrete floor of an auto body shop. She looks both wired and weary, then gradually realizes she needs to do something. Did she kill him? It’s not clear - but...

“What happened?” the doctor in Sex Madness asks, of a female patient who’s come to him with a case of syphilis. “Tell me… everything.” He leans in a bit, and hits that last word… a bit too excitedly. It’s telling – in those two lines of dialogue, in those five words, the actor...

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...

For over two hundred years, the world has been enchanted with Emma, Jane Austen's tale of a "handsome, clever, (and) rich" maiden whose hobby of matchmaking reveals her flaws. Austen brought to life an array of colorful characters across a tidy class spectrum, from lavishly wealthy to modestly...

The Call of the Wild will be the first encounter for some viewers (including this one) with the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios - formerly 20th Century Fox - and its awkwardly truncated logo. It feels like an attempt to claim nothing has really changed, that everything’s the same except for...

One of the running refrains of Daniel Roher’s musical bio-doc Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band is that the group was more than the sum of its parts – each member was a gifted musician and force of personality in their own right, but that when they came together in this...

There’s some sort of irony in Willem Dafoe providing the voice of a cartoon seagull just a few months after he so memorably appeared opposite a much more menacing seagull in The Lighthouse. Imagining Dafoe’s gruff bird flying out of the brightly animated Swift and into the grimy...

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...

Seberg (out Friday in limited release) begins with a reenactment of a scene from Jean Seberg’s first movie, St. Joan (1957), in which Jean was accidentally injured by the flames while filming. Jean would often say later in life that she wished she really had been burnt at the stake-- and...

The Photograph is a movie that feels needlessly unsure of the story it wants to tell. Stella Meghie's romance is, at times, a drama about the emotional legacies we inherit from our parents, and discovering the complex truths behind the people who gave us life. Just as often, however, Meghie’s...

From their screenplay for Alexander Payne’s The Descendants to their joint directorial debut, 2013’s The Way Way Back, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash have specialized in fractious family units whose members have to come to terms with one another in the midst of emotional upheaval. That trend continues...

It’s significant that Portrait of a Lady on Fire is written and directed by a woman--Celine Sciamma--as well as photographed by a female cinematographer, Claire Mathon. This is a film that is fixated on painterly details and the female form, with the kind of comfort and intimacy that a male...

For a group of professional ghost hunters, the main characters in Camp Cold Brook are surprisingly unhappy to discover that the abandoned summer camp they’re investigating is genuinely haunted. At the first sign of actual paranormal activity, the stars of a second-rate cable-TV...

It would be easy for Come as You Are to turn into a cloying, condescending lecture about how the disabled are people, too, and there are times when Richard Wong’s remake of the 2011 Belgian film Hasta La Vista comes pretty close to that. But for the most part, Wong and screenwriter Erik...

A war is being raged over one of the most popular characters in Batman's Rogue's Gallery. Since her 1992 debut on Batman: The Animated Series, Harley Quinn leaped from cartoons to comic books, video games, and live-action movies, with revamps all along the way. She's had new looks, new lovers, new...