Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood is the movie version of the 2012 memoir Full Service, in which George Albert "Scotty" Bowers shared juicy details about his decades-long pimping for Tinseltown celebrities. Shot by director Matt Tyrnauer (Valentino: The Last Emperor) back in 2012-14 (I...

They don't make a lot of movies that are set in 18,000 B.C. and told entirely in made-up caveman languages, perhaps for obvious reasons. Nor is the theme of "where dogs came from" often explored in film, though that angle sounds a lot more lucrative. Here to fill those needs is Alpha, set 20...

Peter Berg, director of good movies like Friday Night Lights and The Rundown, has fallen in with a bad crowd lately, and that crowd's name is Mark Wahlberg. After an auspicious start with Lone Survivor, each of their subsequent collaborations -- Deepwater Horizon, Patriots Day, and now Mile 22 --...

Even by the low standards of lame PG-13 horror movies about teenage girls being harassed by supernatural entities, Slender Man is quite bad. Based on a folkloric boogeyman created in 2009 for an internet contest, this aimless turd has New England high-schoolers Wren (Joey King), Hallie (Julia...

Like most action movies, The Meg begins with its tough-guy hero (who is the best of the best at what he does) performing a mission that goes awry, causing him to blame himself, quit the business, and feel haunted. Then it's a few years later and we're introduced to the scenario that will require...

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,...

You know those Garry Marshall ensemble comedies like Mother's Day and New Year's Eve, where various strangers' lives intersect around a particular theme? Dog Days is like that, only not terrible! Not great, either, but it's sunny and tame and aimed at families, and at least the theme is dogs...

Bo Burnham, the first YouTube comedian to leverage his online fame into a mainstream career, is 27 years old and a boy. Yet he has somehow written and directed Eighth Grade, a marvelously, horrifically authentic dramedy about an awkward and shy 13-year-old girl trying to navigate the last days of...

With basic-cable production values and an exceedingly generic story, The Darkest Minds is the latest teenage dystopian fantasy film based on a trilogy of young adult novels in which a girl learns she is Very Special and becomes a leader in the fight against oppression. It's harmless -- unless...

Disney's Christopher Robin is not a biography of Christopher Robin Milne, the boy featured in his father A.A.'s Winnie-the-Pooh books. There was a movie last year, Goodbye, Christopher Robin, that told that story (more or less). This Disney version pretends we don't know anything about the real...

The two main characters in The Spy Who Dumped Me are ordinary women who get caught up in international espionage and turn out to be -- what are the odds? -- pretty good at it. They shoot villains with relative ease and accuracy, instinctively hide flash drives in their privates, pull switcheroos...

(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival. Theatrical release TBA.) Most of us don't have the exact problems that Alice in Cam has because most of us aren't webcam performers who make a living doing sexy shows online for tips (not that we're judging). But this intriguing if underdeveloped...

Tom Cruise has been starring in Mission: Impossible movies for 22 years, and his character, un-killable super-spy Ethan Hunt, has been on the job for about the same length of time. Hunt isn't an archetype like James Bond, kept forever young(-ish) by recasting the role and disregarding continuity....

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, the very meta big-screen adaptation of the Cartoon Network series Teen Titans Go!, is about a quintet of adolescent superheroes seeking to earn the same respect their adult counterparts get by doing what so many of them have done: starring in a movie. The idea occurs...

It would seem rapper and activist Boots Riley watched a few Michel Gondry movies (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, etc.) and decided to make a whimsical, alternate-reality satire of his own. It's called Sorry to Bother You, and it is indeed his own. Though the inventive visual...