On the surface, it would be almost too easy to dismiss the women of Widows as oblivious, naive, helpless, or – worst of all – dumb. But therein lies the brilliance and thematic intricacy of Steve McQueen’s latest film – a ferocious and sophisticated reimagining of the BBC miniseries that...

I have a VHS problem. They are my Chapstick; bought frequently, replaced before sufficient use, and lost from my pockets as collateral damage when I retrieve change overzealously. Adventures in Home Video™ is an attempt to subsidize that problem and justify its consuming ruin by digging into...

Much has been said about the relationship between Luca Guadagnino’s new remake of Suspiria and Dario Argento’s 1977 original. Guadagnino has taken the skeleton of the story — which concerns an American who joins a prestigious German dance academy only to discover it’s run by a coven of...

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. G.I. Joe. Transformers. Thundercats. Smurfs. M.A.S.K. Rainbow Brite. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My Buddy. Cabbage Patch Kids. These are just a few toy lines that were popular, along with their attendant multimedia franchises, in the second half of the...

Armistice Day 2018 — at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month — will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, when the guns fell silent over Europe. WWI ushered in an age of profound geopolitical and sociological change. Coincident to the conflict, cinema was entering an...

Hard to imagine what could have given filmmakers in 2018 the idea that moviegoers want to see Nazis get killed, but hey, we'll take 'em. Overlord, a violent, horror-tinged, sci-fi take on Germany's World War II atrocities, recalls the Nazisploitation flicks of the '60s and '70s grindhouse circuit,...

It’s a tale as old as time — or at least as old as 1957, when Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was first published: A mean, green, potbellied curmudgeon comes up with a plan to steal Christmas from his annoyingly festive neighbors. Despite a contemporary soundtrack punctuated by...

From the opening credits, it’s clear that director Fede Alvarez hopes audiences will draw comparisons between The Girl in the Spider’s Web and the James Bond films. With its overly stylish opening credits, Alvarez’s sorta-sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn’t so much interested in...

Fifty years ago, at the height of their popularity as television personalities and platinum-selling recording artists, The Monkees — Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork — attempted to break free from the strictures of the personae that had been crafted for them over the...

I'm far from the first one to point this out, but Bohemian Rhapsody -- a biopic of Freddie Mercury (and, to a lesser extent, the band he fronted, known as Queen) -- is the sort of watered-down pablum that should be embarrassed to show its face in a world where Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox...

My understanding of battle rap — informed entirely by Joseph Kahn’s Bodied, a devastatingly funny social commentary — is that it’s like a no-holds-barred comedy roast except the jokes have to rhyme, with participants insulting each other in loosely metered couplets that may be either...

Though written and directed by Tyler Perry, Nobody's Fool starts out bearing little resemblance to a Tyler Perry film. For one thing, it's just called Nobody's Fool, not Tyler Perry's Nobody's Fool. And instead of a clumsy melodrama, it's a clumsy raunchy comedy about a sophisticated New York ad...

In Mexico, the Día de Muertos tradition celebrates life, but also the travels of the dearly departed. Here are three death-themed Mexican films that prioritize spiritual clarity and cultural education, each in its own unique way. México Bárbaro (2014, on Netflix) provocatively captures Día de...

For maximum nostalgia, Mid90s is presented not in widescreen but in 4:3, the way it would have looked on TV or videotape back in the day. "Maximum nostalgia" is the motivating factor for almost everything in Jonah Hill's directorial debut (which he also wrote), a coming-of-age comedy set among...

Johnny English, Rowan Atkinson's bumbling James Bond character who is a more talkative version of his Mr. Bean character, returns for a third outing in Johnny English Strikes Again, a family-friendly spy spoof whose only flaw is that it has zero interest in the characters who aren't Johnny...