Washington Irving’s 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a classic of Gothic horror, an atmospheric and ambiguous tale about a schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane who encounters a possibly supernatural foe known as the Headless Horseman. Tim Burton’s film Sleepy Hollow, released...

In the aftermath of war, especially one as psychologically scarring as World War II, people become obsessed with black and white. Who was right, and who was wrong. But ironically, wartime is when shades of grey have the most variation, when the lines between hero and villain, patriot and traitor,...

Holiday movies, especially Christmas movies, tend to be high-concept affairs, featuring guardian angels, kid-made booby traps, or ghosts haunting a miserly old man. Feast of the Seven Fishes is one of the rare Christmas movies about nothing crazier than a family's Yuletide traditions. The film is...

In Guatemalan writer/director Jayro Bustamante’s feature debut, Ixcanul (2016), the filmmaker shone a light on how an indigenous community around the rim of a volcano inhibited the sexual development and personal agency of 17-year-old María. Their tribalism, traditionalism, and piety keep them...

There’s a lot to like in The Shed, the feature debut of writer-director Frank Sabatella, but there is also, well, just a lot here. Part coming-of-age thriller, part horror, The Shed almost collapses under the weight of its own ambition and its complicated structure.  The film opens with...

There are no legal skirmishes in Ford v Ferrari. The battles between the automakers take place in boardrooms, racetracks, and other places where men have car-measuring contests. Directed by James Mangold, who brought similar confidence to Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma, this is a smooth,...

“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...