Well, folks — we’re now batting two for two when it comes to summer comic book movies and their (wildly superficial) attempts to dismantle the patriarchy one franchise at a time. “You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women,” Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) said in last...

The new Shaft, starring Jessie T. Usher as anxious FBI data analyst John Shaft, is a direct sequel to the 2000 Shaft, which starred Samuel L. Jackson as badass police detective John Shaft, who was the nephew of Richard Roundtree's original John Shaft from 1971, the one that was a sex machine to all...

Jim Jarmusch’s films are frequently populated by richly drawn characters who move through the world at a pace that could generously be described as languid (so languid, in fact, that they often take some time to enter his shots). And until now, that’s never been a problem — in fact, it’s...

Taking a cue from Disney — which makes sense, given the Mouse’s involvement here — writer-director Simon Kinberg jarringly opens Dark Phoenix on a full-on Bambi note for 8-year-old Jean Gray, who has unique telekinetic and and telepathic abilities she’s not fully in control of. It’s...

If you live in L.A. and have writer friends connected to the TV world, you’ve likely heard phrases like “diversity hire” bandied about by well-off white-dude acquaintances more times that you can count. If you live anywhere and have zero friends connected to the TV world, you’ve still...

Coming on the heels of its shaky predecessor, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is a mild, playful surprise with the confidence of a long-running franchise. This week's other new movie, Dark Phoenix, feels like a TV show in a bad way, but TSLOP2 feels like one in a good way, with a sitcom-structured plot...

Look, we’ve got to get one thing out of the way here. If you go into Ma expecting incisive commentary on American racial relations mixed into your horror (the film is content to only go surface-level in this regard), you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The film was directed by Tate Taylor...

If there’s one thing Godzilla: King of the Monsters makes abundantly clear, it’s that we’ve collectively warped our definition of the word “sequel” beyond the point of return. Studios have tried to get around the now-old-fashioned expectation that there be some sort of narrative thread...

Having seen your share of formulaic biopics, you brace yourself when the first scene of Rocketman has Elton John (Taron Egerton) in full concert regalia (orange bird-man costume with devil horns) striding down a corridor in slow-motion while the music swells. "He's on his way to take the stage,"...

The Souvenir — British filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s haunting semi-autobiographical fourth feature — takes its title from a painting Hogg was taken to see by an older man she was dating in her early 20s, while she was attending film school in London. The Rococo painting is housed in The Wallace...

The new Aladdin, directed by English film lad Guy Ritchie (Snatch), is unnecessary even by the standards of unnecessary remakes. It has the exact same plot as the 1992 animated classic, slowed down so it takes a half hour longer. The songs are the same but lack motion because they're arranged as...

As horror premises go, "What if Superman were a sociopath?" is among the best I've heard lately. Brightburn, a scruffy, nasty, low-budget effort produced by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn and written by his brothers Brian and Mark, executes it fairly well, feeding on parental fears...

I don’t think that Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) — the lovable weird-girl protagonists of Booksmart — would begrudge me for giving Olivia Wilde’s equally lovable, weird debut feature a solid B+. Although I imagine they might have chased me down and tried to argue for...

The true story that Trial by Fire is based on, told by David Grann in a 2009 New Yorker article, is fascinating and suspenseful, full of twists that make you reexamine your assumptions, but the movie version -- directed by bland social crusader Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) from a...

A lot of great art has been made about random but life-changing interactions between total strangers. Richard Linklater’s ’90s indie romance Before Sunrise is just one example of what can happen when you set two attractive young people on a collision course and follow them as they spent a full...