After last year's bumpy edition of Fantastic Fest, roiled by revelations that its founder had continued working with employees and associates who'd been credibly accused of sexual assault, this year's raucous genre celebration felt almost normal — well, "normal" for an event that includes a...

Like all film fans, I was ecstatic when the lineups for the Toronto, Venice, and Telluride film festivals were announced. There were so many movies to sink my teeth into that I knew I had to go. So, I set up a GoFundMe to pay for my trip, and agreed to write a report for Crooked Marquee. As it...

I skipped out on the big political event of the Toronto International Film Festival, the premiere of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, a screening at which the director brought out Flint residents and Parkland survivors to drive home the immediacy of the documentary. Moore’s films are designed...

“Addiction is our new default,” quips Juliette Binoche’s Selena in Non-Fiction, a special presentation at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. She’s talking about the rise of binge-watching culture changing viewing patterns, but she might as well be referring to a good chunk...

This weekend, the female guerrilla rises again with the release of Peppermint, the story of a woman who wakes from a coma to get jacked and find the people who killed her family. Peppermint, aka Riley North (aka Jennifer Garner), hunts down and kills a lot of bad guys with knives, guns, and her...

We've hit sort of a dry spell in the horror field these past few weeks. Not much in the way of theatrical releases, although you can still catch The Meg (Eric’s review) if the idea of Jason Statham beating up a prehistoric shark sounds amusing. (It is.) New on DVD, we got the quietly awesome...

Sorry to Bother You writer-director Boots Riley recently took to social media to criticize Spike Lee’s new movie BlacKkKlansman — based on the true story of a black Colorado Springs police detective’s undercover infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s — for what he perceived as the...

If you're looking for something scary at the multiplexes, you can check out The Meg (Eric's review) which is not all that scary but it is kind of fun, or Slender Man (Eric's review) which is neither scary nor fun. But if you're willing to go digging through the VOD channels you can always find a...

I’ve loved rom-coms my entire life, somehow able to separate their regressive values from my general disdain for the patriarchy. Writers have rightfully spearheaded feminist critiques when discussing this genre, calling out its thin female protagonists and sexist jokes. But many ignore the other...

Molding your cute little dumpling bun of a child takes care and practice. What to do when your sweet baby bun starts to rebel or brings home a girlfriend you don’t like? Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians and Domee Shi’s 8-minute Pixar short Bao (which played with Incredibles...

If you're like me, you 1) assumed the Fantasia International Film Festival just showed Disney's Fantasia on a loop for a few days; and 2) are a moron, because how would that even work? It turns out Fantasia is a "genre" festival -- horror, sci-fi, martial arts, weird comedies, anime, gross stuff,...

If you faced The Meg (opening this weekend), a 75-foot prehistoric shark properly called “Megalodon,” odds are you wouldn’t survive. In that spirit, let’s remember some of the aquatic killers that have scared us since the 1950s and calculate the odds of surviving an encounter with...

(Spoilers for Blindspotting.) Blindspotting is nearly a musical. Music — specifically rapping — plays a significant role in the development of the film’s themes and its main characters, best friends Collin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal), to the point where rapping sometimes takes...

Not much in the "wide release" department recently (but that's about to change), so here's a rundown of some of the more intriguing new releases in the "watch it at home" department. It's a mixed bag, big time. But hey, sometime those are fun. Our House — What happens when a brilliant but...

Now that Black Panther has dispelled the long-held belief that African-American movies don't do well overseas, Hollywood is scrambling to green-light more black-led projects. But they don't always get these attempts to cash in on diversity quite right, as evidenced by these titles and log lines now...