The 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) felt unusually heavy with films concerning religion and its followers. Of the more than 30 films I screened, nearly a third grappled with what it means to be a person of faith or live in a world where religious institutions structure daily life....

In the year since it was unleashed on the public, two schools of thought have formed around Crazy Rich Asians. Hailed for its inclusion of Asian and Asian-American actors in an industry where said actors are often sidelined, the Golden Globe-nominated romantic-comedy has been recognized as a...

I have a complicated relationship with the Telluride Film Festival. It's a world-class fest, usually playing some of the year's best movies, many of them world premieres introduced in person by their directors and stars, who are always humble and gracious. The venues, despite being commandeered...

A movie about grown-ups playing hide and seek is out now, hot on the heels of last year's movies about people people playing tag and truth or dare. Naturally, one wonders: What other childhood games could be turned into movies? I took a trip down memory lane and came up with these beloved pastimes...

(Editor's note: This piece is about moviegoing in a European capital that most of our readers probably haven't been to, but the nostalgia and cinephilia on display are universally relatable.) The sound of the dinosaurs made the room tremble. It also shook slightly whenever they walked,...

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is a hit, and it’s clear that the Fast & Furious franchise has no intention of putting on the brakes. If you wonder what the future holds for the nearly 20-year-old series, wonder no longer! My intrepid barber, Jean, “got access to” Universal...

“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens,” wrote Dostoyevsky, “but by how it treats its criminals.” Genre cinema from across the globe often provides such insight through penalizing transgression rather than illuminating virtue. Across a number of titles at...

Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) sits next to a skateboard at the beginning of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and for the rest of the film, which follows Jimmie and best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) as they try to regain ownership of Jimmie’s childhood house, the board rarely leaves his side. It’s...

Growing up in rural New York where heavy snow is just a matter of course, you have an innate understanding of exactly how long a winter storm can be considered tolerable, or even fun. For most people, it’s about 72 hours. Up until then, it’s a novelty, even for people who have spent their lives...

Is there such a thing as too much genre cinema? If so, then it would likely occur at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, an over-three week long celebration of the bonkers and brilliant excesses taking place at the exciting edges of filmmaking. The fest’s 23rd edition begins July 11 with a slate of...

As someone who was born a handful of months before the first Toy Story came out, the hit franchise has always very clearly been about one thing: me.  Or at least, people like me: kids raised on the sheer optimism of Disney renaissance and peak Pixar slowly learning together what it means to grow...

We didn’t need another X-Men movie. Ever since the raucous pastiche of the original Deadpool and the bloated, redundant X-Men: Apocalypse, it seemed clear that Fox’s mutant movies had run their course. But that didn’t stop another from stumbling into theaters a few weeks ago with the...

It has escaped few moviegoers' notice that within the last week three movies about sentient dolls have been released: Toy Story 4, Child's Play, and Annabelle Comes Home. Given the chaotic nature of multiplexes and the incompetence of parents, it's easy to see how confusion may arise. And so, in...

It’s no secret that a biopic is the surest route to Oscar love. Academy voters need only catch a glimpse of artfully applied facial prosthetics and hear an actor’s best impression of a historical figure, and they’re swooning. But considering how critically well-regarded and frequently made...

Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Biden, O’Rourke, Harris, Yang. Uh ... I wanna say Islee? Is that one? The list of Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential election continues to grow. Now one more public figure has decided to run for office, and he’s a doozy. Godzilla, the 65-year-old strange...