“Another movie from an old TV show,” sighs a character at the beginning of 2000’s Charlie’s Angels when confronted with the fictional T.J. Hooker: The Movie. Coming at around the same time as the feature-film versions of Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, The Avengers and Wild Wild West,...

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...

Income inequality has seldom been funnier than in Parasite, a scathing satire-farce-tragedy-horror from South Korea's Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, The Host) in which a family of scrappy strivers weasel their way into the employ of a rich family and find out how the 1 percent lives. Turns out there's...

The one advantage of Nicolas Cage starring in approximately 87 straight-to-video movies a year for the past decade is that he sometimes adds a bit of unique flavor to rote thrillers and action movies that would otherwise be entirely forgotten. Cage doesn’t bring much to the table in Primal,...

Not all Christmas movies need to be great art. The Hallmark Channel, Lifetime and even Netflix have proven that for every The Bishop’s Wife or It’s a Wonderful Life, there’s also a place for improbable romantic cheese involving holiday spirit and a strategically placed sprig of mistletoe....

In a way, The Irishman speaks to the odd crossroads where we find ourselves in the midst of the streaming wars. It’s been said, and accurately, that one of Netflix’s strengths is the ability to greenlight the kind of content that traditional film studios usually don’t. It’s likely that...

The opening of Graham Swon’s debut feature, The World is Full of Secrets, is intriguing and odd: a shadowy background of flowery wallpaper with a voiceover from what sounds like a health education film from the 1950s. A man’s proper English voice describes how “the mind of a teenage girl”...

Kasi Lemmons’ Harriet is a biopic about abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman that feels as if it were made not in 2019 but the 1990s. It’s part of an old-school subset of movies based on true events that work more as history lessons than as cinema. Think, for example, of Apollo 13 (1995) or...

In 1989, the popularity of the Nightmare On Elm Street series and its flagship character, Freddy Krueger, were still going strong. Wes Craven, who'd created them both, had parted ways with the series due to creative differences, and his attempts to break out of horror with hybrid films like the...

Winnipeg, Canada, has produced more than its share of strange and singular filmmakers. Guy Maddin is likely the most well-known, but Manitoba’s capital has also issued forth George Toles (Maddin’s frequent screenwriter), John Paizs (writer/director/star of the unclassifiable “Colour Crime...

In Countdown, the mildly stupid teen horror flick about a phone app that tells you how long you have to live, it's not the app that kills you. The app doesn't have any control over your lifespan, either, which is to say, the act of asking has no effect on the answer. The app is just conveying...

Greener Grass is an absurdist suburban satire written and directed by Upright Citizens Brigade alumnae Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, populated with like-minded sketch-and-improv workhorses (including SNL’s Beck Bennett), everyone clearly having a good time doing their weird things. It’s set...

You'd be forgiven for thinking The Lighthouse is a comedy when the first two things that happen are Robert Pattinson bumping his head and swearing and Willem Dafoe farting. But while those and a handful of other humorous moments and outlandish events do make this a nutty affair, the sophomore...

Another one of this week's unnecessary sequels is Zombieland: Double Tap, a hit-or-miss follow-up to the perfectly good 2009 comedy that brings back the original cast of post-zombie-apocalypse survivors just to put them through the same paces as last time. If the dizzying amount of change the...

Once upon a time (wait, actually just this week), Disney released a live-action sequel that literally no one asked for that actually seemed to boast a pretty compelling premise. Hitting theaters just in time for Halloween, and with a perfectly Halloween-ready title to boot, Maleficent: Mistress of...