Screenlife — the screen-capture-style gimmick-turned-medium used in movies like Unfriended (2014) and Searching (2018) — feels like a textbook bad idea. The style was largely pioneered by Russian director and producer Timur Bekmambetov, whose studio, Bazelevs, developed technology to propel...

Fans of A Star Is Born are already listening to the soundtrack on repeat, but here's something new to add to the mix! Warner Bros. has released this demo recording of one of the songs, originally written and performed by Randy Newman. Why they changed the lyrics and style to the version heard in...

A Star Is Born has changed from the story of an actress (1937) to the story of a musical actress (1954), then a rock star (1976), and now a pop diva. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the casting of a gay icon and a hot leading man in the central roles. Since that formula works, we’re...

A Star Is Born, the story of a romance between a fading male celebrity and a rising female artist so good it’s been told four times already, is in theaters now. Based on the incredible buzz the film has been getting from critics on the festival circuit, Warner Bros. smells Oscar gold as well as...

The Horror Corner took a week off to enjoy the amazing Fantastic Fest, where there were lots of horrors afoot, and I don't just mean Eric D. Snider wearing a wacky wrestling singlet for three days. (He lost a bet!) Several of these horror films will be hitting VOD services and/or Netflix some time...

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...