A young makeup artist named Gloria travels down to Mexico to help a friend win a local beauty pageant. After witnessing a shooting at a dance club, Gloria’s friend is kidnapped and she finds herself caught in the crossfire between the corrupt Mexican law enforcement and a local cartel. Gloria is...

(Screened at the Sundance Film Festival; Amazon Studios will release it later this year.) In 1977, NASA scientists put out the word that they'd be recording greetings from people from around the world and sending them (the recordings) into space to welcome any potential aliens who happened by....

(Screened at the Sundance Film Festival; HBO Films will release it later this year) Little had to be changed about the plot of Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son to make it work with an adaptation set in the present, but something must have been lost in translation. As directed by...

Serenity is: A) an early contender for the worst movie of 2019; B) a bonkers attempt at beachy noir starring Matthew McConaughey as a fisherman named Baker Dill; C) a bizarrely perfect companion piece to The Book of Henry; D) all of the above. The answer is, of course, D – all of the above....

For the second year, Turner Classic Movies’ weekly trip to Noir Alley – hosted by Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation – is taking February off for the channel’s “31 Days of Oscar,” when all it airs are films that won or were nominated for Academy Awards. But...

When actor Bob Balaban was gathering a crew for his directorial debut, Parents, a would-be applicant walked in and said, “I don’t really want to do this with you, I just came in to tell you you’re evil.”  That’s great press for any horror movie, but especially for the first feature...

M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable was arguably years ahead of its time. Released in 2000, five years before Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Shyamalan’s low-key superhero/supervillain origin story was the sort of grounded comic book film that studios are still trying (and failing) to make....

The final scene in 2017’s Split revealed that the movie, thought to be a self-contained M. Night Shyamalan thriller, had been a secret sequel to the writer-director’s own Unbreakable from 17 years earlier. While that twist was a very novel one at the time, it has been recently revealed to me...

Although it caters to a large community of retirees, the Palm Springs International Film Festival still features its share of daring selections, on a program full of awards favorites (thanks to the festival’s timing, right in the middle of awards season) and official submissions for the Best...

It's not fair to call Replicas the stupidest movie of 2019. The year is only two weeks old -- and besides, it was supposed to be the stupidest movie of 2017, before it got shelved for reasons that become apparent upon viewing it. An affectless Keanu Reeves whisper-mumbles his way through the...

Everything about The Upside feels contrived and phony, like the movie version of an inspiring-but-fake anecdote your aunt shared on Facebook. Which is impressive, considering it's a true story. Of course, it's more directly a remake of the French film The Intouchables, which itself was inspired...

For most viewers, cult director John Waters' movies are synonymous with transvestism, “bad taste” humor, and toxic American kitsch. But the Baltimore auteur has explored various political, sociological, and psychological themes in his movies over the course of his half-century career (his first...

If you think you would enjoy an uncomplicated, PG-rated movie about a dog traveling 400 miles to be reunited with her humans, there's an excellent chance you will enjoy A Dog's Way Home, which is exactly that and does exactly what you'd expect it to do (albeit with more CGI cats). Based on W....

Destroyer begins with a bedraggled, hungover L.A. police detective being summoned to a crime scene: a man with a distinctive tattoo on the back of his neck shot dead, surrounded by ink-stained money. The weathered detective, Erin Bell, played by a severely de-beautified Nicole Kidman, tells her...

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...