(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...

My friend Eric "Dee" Snider once asked me, "Hey Scott, you're erudite and learned in the realm of horror cinema, so why not tell me what's going on lately with your very favorite genre?" So instead of answering him I just hung up the phone and started writing. And the plan is to write something...

From The Searchers to You Were Never Really Here, the "captivity narrative" is one of America's strongest tropes When Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (now available on DVD/VOD) came out this past spring, it was hailed as a modern update of Taxi Driver. Like Martin Scorsese’s...

“We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” This quote is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but its real origins lie in G. Stanley Hall’s 1904 book Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime,...

I can still feel the weight on my chest as my husband and I left the theater in silence after A Quiet Place. As a parent in general — but specifically as a parent of a little black boy — it felt all too real, this high-stakes world in which merely existing can be deadly and the smallest mistake...

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...