Despite their adventures ostensibly being aimed at kids, most superheroes aren't children themselves. Except for the Spider-Men and occasional moments with the younger X-Persons, we rarely see a superhero revel in the sheer delight of having awesome powers. So part of what makes Shazam! a treat...

The latest film to earn the distinction of being #1 at the box office and universally disliked is Dumbo, from Disney, the studio that's usually responsible for highly successful movies that everybody hates. How did this happen? Well, we snuck into the Disney offices a few years ago and planted a...

Spoilers for Us. For most in the film business, marketing is simply a tool, a way to let potential customers know about a product being sold. There are a few filmmakers, however, who have control over their marketing materials and, rather than just use them as advertising, make them an extension...

The title character in The Beach Bum, a stoner-poet named Moondog, is the part Matthew McConaughey was born to play, and he is indeed at his McConaughey-est here: grinning, giggling, pontificating, publicly urinating, stumbling hazily from one party to the next, just generally living his best life....

The self-cannibalization at Disney continues with Dumbo, a turgid, labored, bloated live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with precisely none of the original's emotion, charm, or joy. Why do these things that are obviously bad ideas to begin with keep turning out so bad? It is a...

Coming-out stories have become common enough that movies are starting to tell them with nuance. The "Am I gay?" question no longer has only two possible answers; there's a whole spectrum, as 17-year-old Franky Winter (Josh Wiggins) discovers in Giant Little Ones, a discreet and decidedly...

Since the dawn of that guy who tried to cut all women out of The Last Jedi, we’ve entered a new era of fandom. An era of thankless course correction, where anyone with a childhood sculpted by a certain piece of art gets to tell the artist how it really belongs to them, and they have notes. The...

Twenty years ago, Katarina Stratford — played by the inimitable Julia Stiles — blasted Joan Jett’s “My Reputation” from the speakers of her 1964 Dodge Dart; Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona danced across stadium bleachers belting Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”; and...

An apocalyptic event happens so subtly in Starfish that you almost don't notice it. The reasons for that are probably more practical than artistic -- it costs money to show widespread devastation -- but it adds to the intrigue of this melancholy sci-fi drama, which can feel both realistic and...

Jordan Peele, the newly minted horror auteur behind Get Out, gives us a lot to process in the early minutes of his follow-up, the suspenseful and more overtly horrific Us. We're told of a network of underground tunnels in the United States (the "U.S." of the title?); images of rabbits in cages...

One thing you can say for sure about Relaxer: There will never be a gender-swapped remake of it. The story, first juvenile and then surreal, only makes sense in the context of men's craving for competition and willingness to spend absurd amounts of time and energy on total nonsense. That's not to...

J.K. Rowling continues to make waves by revealing details about the sex lives of her characters that were never mentioned in the books or the movies, but there's a lot more where that came from. As a gay, I have finely tuned gaydar that extends even to film characters. Here are my latest findings...

Captain Marvel may seem to be the action movie event of the month, but for fans of martial arts cinema, there’s a far more exciting film coming to Video on Demand on March 22. Its name is Triple Threat, and it seems tailor-made for action junkies who grew up on a diet of ’80s hard-body action...

This time last year, Hereditary was already being heralded as the best horror film of 2018 following screenings at Sundance and SXSW. And just one year prior, Get Out was praised as one of the best horror films of all time following its premiere at Sundance. Both festivals often yield some of the...

Our ongoing and long-overdue reckoning with sexual abuse and harassment has inspired a new wave of cinema; not only are we seeing more empowering and diverse representations of women and minority groups, but we’re seeing stories that reckon with the root cause of so much of this abuse: toxic...