The Australian filmmaker Joel Edgerton, who directed The Gift and played Uncle Owen in the Star Wars prequels, is not gay. This felt apparent to me, a gay, watching Boy Erased, which Edgerton adapted and directed from Garrard Conley's memoir about having to attend "conversion therapy." It's a...

The biggest crime in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald surprisingly isn’t one perpetrated by Johnny Depp (though he’s definitely a problem). What makes this sequel to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them such a frustrating experience is that everything about it — save for the...

(Streaming on Netflix.) 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 thriller from first-time director Daniel...

On the surface, it would be almost too easy to dismiss the women of Widows as oblivious, naive, helpless, or – worst of all – dumb. But therein lies the brilliance and thematic intricacy of Steve McQueen’s latest film – a ferocious and sophisticated reimagining of the BBC miniseries that...

The Front Runner, Jason Reitman's political dramedy and light satire about Gary Hart, is set in a quaint, bygone era when adultery could derail a politician's career and when there were no news networks trying to fill 24 hours of programming each day. Things are different now, but the film, mostly...

Hard to imagine what could have given filmmakers in 2018 the idea that moviegoers want to see Nazis get killed, but hey, we'll take 'em. Overlord, a violent, horror-tinged, sci-fi take on Germany's World War II atrocities, recalls the Nazisploitation flicks of the '60s and '70s grindhouse circuit,...

It’s a tale as old as time — or at least as old as 1957, when Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was first published: A mean, green, potbellied curmudgeon comes up with a plan to steal Christmas from his annoyingly festive neighbors. Despite a contemporary soundtrack punctuated by...

From the opening credits, it’s clear that director Fede Alvarez hopes audiences will draw comparisons between The Girl in the Spider’s Web and the James Bond films. With its overly stylish opening credits, Alvarez’s sorta-sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn’t so much interested in...

I'm far from the first one to point this out, but Bohemian Rhapsody -- a biopic of Freddie Mercury (and, to a lesser extent, the band he fronted, known as Queen) -- is the sort of watered-down pablum that should be embarrassed to show its face in a world where Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox...

My understanding of battle rap — informed entirely by Joseph Kahn’s Bodied, a devastatingly funny social commentary — is that it’s like a no-holds-barred comedy roast except the jokes have to rhyme, with participants insulting each other in loosely metered couplets that may be either...

Though written and directed by Tyler Perry, Nobody's Fool starts out bearing little resemblance to a Tyler Perry film. For one thing, it's just called Nobody's Fool, not Tyler Perry's Nobody's Fool. And instead of a clumsy melodrama, it's a clumsy raunchy comedy about a sophisticated New York ad...

For maximum nostalgia, Mid90s is presented not in widescreen but in 4:3, the way it would have looked on TV or videotape back in the day. "Maximum nostalgia" is the motivating factor for almost everything in Jonah Hill's directorial debut (which he also wrote), a coming-of-age comedy set among...

Johnny English, Rowan Atkinson's bumbling James Bond character who is a more talkative version of his Mr. Bean character, returns for a third outing in Johnny English Strikes Again, a family-friendly spy spoof whose only flaw is that it has zero interest in the characters who aren't Johnny...

The premise behind Ike Barinholtz's dark comedy The Oath is ripe with possibilities: A liberal man and his wife host his conservative relatives for Thanksgiving week, which coincides with a particularly divisive political issue tearing the country apart. There's comedic tension in everyone trying...

The rather arbitrarily titled Hunter Killer is a submarine movie for dads, based on a novel called Firing Point (another random title) that looks like it is probably only for sale in airports. The dividing line on movies of this nature is thin and extremely subjective, but for me Hunter...