Assassination Nation, based on the hashtags #woke and #metoo, is an in-your-face, self-consciously edgy satire about a town called Salem that goes witch-hunting after everyone's online accounts are hacked and their secrets (and nude pics) are exposed. The primary target of everyone's ire is Lily...

Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird have recently been praised for dealing seriously with their young female subjects, the filmmakers giving teenage girls’ lives the meticulous treatment that Hollywood usually reserves for, I don’t know, Breaking Bad, or films about dead...

Some movies conjure up bittersweet recollections while emitting positive vibes. That’s all part of the cinematic experience — relating to subject material but still allowing the deepest cuts to bleed, and immersing yourself in uncensored memories from a more naive time, all in the name of...

Like all film fans, I was ecstatic when the lineups for the Toronto, Venice, and Telluride film festivals were announced. There were so many movies to sink my teeth into that I knew I had to go. So, I set up a GoFundMe to pay for my trip, and agreed to write a report for Crooked Marquee. As it...

I skipped out on the big political event of the Toronto International Film Festival, the premiere of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, a screening at which the director brought out Flint residents and Parkland survivors to drive home the immediacy of the documentary. Moore’s films are designed...

Unlike the late entries in some horror franchises, The Predator doesn't pretend any of its predecessors didn't happen, but you don't need to have seen them, either. Directed and co-written by Shane Black (who was an actor in the original 1987 Predator), this gory, quippy sequel assumes you'll...

Based on Darcey Bell's novel, which must have been inspired by Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, A Simple Favor is a funny, dark-edged, lurid mystery-melodrama starring Anna Kendrick as a naive stay-at-home mom named Stephanie Smothers who turns detective when her hoity-toity best friend Emily Nelson...

It's unlikely (I hope) that the Wershe family of Detroit will remind you of your own clan. As portrayed in White Boy Rick, a compelling if familiar fact-based drama set in 1984-88, the Wershes are low-class ignoramuses, the type of family where the dad (Matthew McConaughey) and his junkie teenage...

“Addiction is our new default,” quips Juliette Binoche’s Selena in Non-Fiction, a special presentation at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. She’s talking about the rise of binge-watching culture changing viewing patterns, but she might as well be referring to a good chunk...

Mandy stars Nicolas Cage, with Andrea Riseborough as his wife, the two of them living a lumberjack’s life in the Pacific Northwest in 1983. Intercut with scenes of their idyllic existence, reading fantasy novels and talking about which planets are their favorites, are scenes of a cult leader...

Twenty years after Rounders’ release, the gambling narrative remains applicable in a world of post-20th-century hustlers. Written by the creative team behind Showtime’s Billions (Brian Koppelman and David Levien), John Dahl’s film captures the spirit of underground poker and the skillset...

In yet another Death Wish update teaching the valuable lesson that violence is the answer, Peppermint presents Jennifer Garner as Riley North, a Los Angeles woman who seeks revenge after her husband (Jeff Hephner) and little girl (Cailey Fleming) are killed by Mexican gangbangers. To prove the...

You know how sometimes a horror movie will have various creepy apparitions, and how it doesn't really matter why those particular images were chosen, the point is just to be creepy? But then you know how sometimes a horror movie makes a lot of money, so Warner Bros. commissions sequels and prequels...

Arizona is a dark horror/comedy set after the housing collapse in 2009, an era that ought to have inspired more dark horror/comedies than it has. It stars Rosemarie DeWitt as a divorced mom in an Arizona suburb who’s about to lose her house while still working for the sleazy realtor (Seth Rogen)...

(Opens Oct. 12) Ryan Gosling is a handsome man, but it's his profile that's most aesthetically pleasing. We saw a lot of it in Drive, where he sat behind the wheel of a car and was was often photographed from the passenger seat, and we see it again in First Man, where he's a test pilot in a...