If you search the depths of Film Twitter, you’ll discover something about me: I hate everything written by Taylor Sheridan. His films — Hell or High Water, Wind River, Sicario, and Sicario: Day of the Soldado — hearken back to classic cinema, particularly the Western, so it’s disappointing...

Statistics! Who doesn't love 'em?? We're going to look at the movies released in the first half of 2018, but let me warn you: There are probably a lot more than you realize. If you want to see a list of every movie released in the U.S. in a particular year, all you have to do is go to the...

The horror genre is a way of processing our fears and anxieties, and as a result tends to reflect the issues that exist at the time the stories or films are written. During the Reagan era, in the early 1980s, horror films tended to depict attacks on innocence, with grisly deaths befalling wayward...

Nestled among this spring’s blockbusters, two mid-tier comedies – Overboard and Life of the Party – provided audiences with alternatives in more ways than one. In addition to being options that didn’t involve genocidal giants or mouthy mercenaries, they’re also gender-swapped variations...

Solo: A Star Wars Story opens in a few days, and everyone is supremely excited because making a prequel to Star Wars is a slam-dunk idea that can’t fail. Most fans are content to sit back and wait for the film to open, but true fans know that waiting is for “nerf herders.” Secrecy is at an...

“She really is so hard on herself,” remarks a relative of the titular character in Kent Jones’ Diane. A gaggle of cousins have come to Diane’s rescue after a drink to unwind for self-care spirals into raging drunkenness. Diane can easily attend to the needs of others, but when it comes to...

In The Great Pretender, Mona (Maëlle Poesy-Guichard) insists that her autobiographical play is honest but her ex-boyfriend (Linas Phillips) says it's "confessional.” “Is there a difference?” she asks. “Yeah, honesty is hard,” Nick replies, vocalizing a standout theme in the 2018 Tribeca...

Two new films released in April, Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete and Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, take place in the American West and contain plenty of obvious signifiers: rustic communities, wide open spaces, horses. Yet neither really feels like a Western. When I asked both directors (in separate...

Blumhouse. The name has become synonymous with horror over the last decade. From macro-budget success stories to projects that make other production houses tremble, Blumhouse has proven itself repeatedly, with hits that include the Insidious, Sinister, and The Purge franchises. What makes the...

'If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait till I get through with it.' — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup  Armando Iannucci's historical farce The Death of Stalin — which traces the madcap scramble for power between members of Russia’s ruling Central Committee in the days...

Movie monsters have always symbolized our hidden fears and desires. It’s impossible to dissociate the hulking behemoth of Godzilla from the atomic bomb and Japan’s perception of the good ol’ U.S. of A. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula represented our fear of foreigners in the early ‘30s; the pod...

Howdy, amigos! Looks like the Earth spun around seven times and brought us to another edition of the Friday Movie Pile & Slang Terms for Being Drunk, the long-running weekly feature that is the Internet's top source for new movie releases and euphemisms for intoxication. Accept no substitutes...

A Quiet Place was released this weekend to big acclaim and even bigger box office. The movie is not only impressive for the fact that it’s an original non-franchise horror film that’s largely dialogue free, but that the co-writer and director is none other than John Krasinski of The Office...

It's the end of the week, so you know what that means: time for the Friday Movie Pile & Pictures of Chris Evans As Captain America! (It may be time for other things as well, but they are of no concern to us.) We've provided this same combination of services -- a rundown of the weekend's new...

Happy Easter/Passover/unaffiliated weekend, everyone! This is your Friday Movie Pile & Do-It-Yourself Woodworking Instructions, a weekly guide to the new films plus directions for building handsome, functional furniture. Let's see what treasures await us! Ready Player One (PG-13,...