As horror premises go, "What if Superman were a sociopath?" is among the best I've heard lately. Brightburn, a scruffy, nasty, low-budget effort produced by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn and written by his brothers Brian and Mark, executes it fairly well, feeding on parental fears...

I don’t think that Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) — the lovable weird-girl protagonists of Booksmart — would begrudge me for giving Olivia Wilde’s equally lovable, weird debut feature a solid B+. Although I imagine they might have chased me down and tried to argue for...

In the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, one of the stories Lynch recounts from his childhood is the time a naked woman appeared out of the blue on his suburban street, a bewildering sight for an impressionable boy. He doesn’t make the connection in that interview, but this was clearly...

The true story that Trial by Fire is based on, told by David Grann in a 2009 New Yorker article, is fascinating and suspenseful, full of twists that make you reexamine your assumptions, but the movie version -- directed by bland social crusader Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) from a...

A lot of great art has been made about random but life-changing interactions between total strangers. Richard Linklater’s ’90s indie romance Before Sunrise is just one example of what can happen when you set two attractive young people on a collision course and follow them as they spent a full...

John Wick's first line of dialogue in John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum is an instruction to a taxi driver: "The New York Public Library." How cool that an elite assassin is also a reader! Shortly after arriving at the library, he kills someone with a book. This is also cool. Look, we contain...

Stay with me here. A Dog's Journey is a sequel to A Dog's Purpose (2017), both based on novels by W. Bruce Cameron. They're similar to A Dog's Way Home (from earlier this year) but aren't connected to it in any way except that A Dog's Way Home was based on another, separate novel by W. Bruce...

(On Netflix.) The premise behind Wine Country is that SNL alumnae Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and Ana Gasteyer, and SNL writers Paula Pell and Emily Spivey, wanted to make a movie where the six of them could hang out. (Don't worry, there's a part for Tina Fey, too.) This sounds a lot...

Even the devout keepers of the flame at Fangoria lost track of Fright Night Part II. First they reported an August 1988 release and featured it that month as if it were playing at a theater near you, then covered it again in September with the vague assurance it’d see the light of day in 1988....

(In theaters and on Netflix.) It was inevitable that a former teen star from the Disney Channel would eventually play a serial killer, if not actually become one. Zac Efron, whose breakout performance in High School Musical was more than 13 years ago, is good as Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked,...

Her Smell – writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s latest abrasive outing – opens with an oddly comforting image. We meet rock trio Something She in the early '90s as they’re celebrating an appearance on the cover of Spin magazine before we cut abruptly to a few years later. The group’s...

Amazing Grace, Aretha Franklin's 1972 double-album of gospel songs, was the top-selling record of her career and the bestselling live gospel album of all time. (There might have been more live gospel albums than you realize.) It was recorded over two nights at a Baptist church in L.A.'s Watts...

In theory, I would absolutely love to see a comedy starring Diane Keaton, Pam Grier, and Rhea Perlman that hits out against the agist, sexist societal impulses that seek to relegate women into some sort of cosmic cast-off pile once they’re deemed “too old” to be appreciated (read:...

The story and premise of The Hustle are so elegant in their simplicity that it's no surprise this film has already been made twice: first as Bedtime Story (1964), with Marlon Brando and David Niven, then as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), with Steve Martin and Michael Caine. Directed by British TV...

As neither a child of the '90s, a current child, or a person who has ever played Pokemon, I am not the target audience for Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, a kid-focused, live-action PG adventure that assumes viewers are already familiar with Pokemon lore and have no unresolved questions. If you're...