Road trips have long been a fixture of the comedy genre. From the Frank Capra masterwork It Happened One Night (1934) to arthouse fare like Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip (2015), the formula continues to be an effective way to string together a series of comic set pieces. Perhaps no...

The idea behind this remake of The Lion King was to tell the same story but with real animals. That being impractical, however, they had to use computer-generated animals that merely look real and don't do anything that real animals aren't physically capable of. It's the closest we'll ever get to...

There’s scarcely a review of Midsommar that doesn’t include a mention of The Wicker Man — and with good reason. (Ours is no exception.) Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult classic is the pre-eminent folk-horror film and a clear influence on Ari Aster’s modern cult-film-in-the-making, but it’s...

Human beings have a natural fear of animal attacks, a fear that horror movies have exploited since cinema began. At first they tended to be extinct or exaggerated animals (think King Kong); then the Atomic Age introduced the idea of real animals made huge by radiation. It was Steven Spielberg’s...

If there’s a normal path that most bands take between record companies and Hollywood, odds are it looks nothing like the one traveled by Sue Saad and the Next. Consider that until three years ago, the band had only a single album to their name; then consider that their music has featured  —...

After suffering through last year’s wildly self-indulgent, overly serious Disobedience, I was ready to write off any and all “artistic but struggling 30-something adult comes home for the first time in years for a very important funeral and/or family tragedy and has important awakening” films...

Stuber is a familiar product -- a violent action comedy about a civilian who gets dragged into police work -- with a twist that's more depressing than was probably intended. Kumail Nanjiani plays the nicknamed title character, beta-male Uber driver Stu, who is commandeered by Dave Bautista's...

I’ll say one thing for Crawl, the new gator caper clawing its way into theaters this weekend: It’s rather snappily paced. Clocking in at an easy, breezy 87 minutes, director Alexandre Aja’s film wastes absolutely zero time setting its scaly predators on its unsuspecting victims, who are...

Is there such a thing as too much genre cinema? If so, then it would likely occur at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, an over-three week long celebration of the bonkers and brilliant excesses taking place at the exciting edges of filmmaking. The fest’s 23rd edition begins July 11 with a slate of...

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be 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...

As someone who was born a handful of months before the first Toy Story came out, the hit franchise has always very clearly been about one thing: me.  Or at least, people like me: kids raised on the sheer optimism of Disney renaissance and peak Pixar slowly learning together what it means to grow...

Back in 1982, an independent filmmaker named Jenny Bowen made a movie called Street Music, which centered around the working-class long-term residents of a San Francisco apartment building in the Tenderloin. The rent-controlled building — long neglected — gets acquired by a wealthy landlord who...

There are a lot of reasons to go after Forrest Gump (1994). It’s a long, unfocused movie about a passive character who nevertheless shapes the course of human history in about 30 different ways. It’s a film without much on its mind, so pleased with its premise that it doesn’t bother to...

If books could always be accurately judged by their covers, the bespectacled, unassuming Ari Aster would be an accountant or an I.T. guy, not the fever-brained lunatic behind the deeply unsettling horror movie Hereditary -- my favorite film of 2018 -- and its followup, Midsommar, a sunlit pagan...

We didn’t need another X-Men movie. Ever since the raucous pastiche of the original Deadpool and the bloated, redundant X-Men: Apocalypse, it seemed clear that Fox’s mutant movies had run their course. But that didn’t stop another from stumbling into theaters a few weeks ago with the...