We'll talk about the behind-the-scenes turmoil at Fantastic Fest in another wordpile. In the meantime, here are reviews of some of the notable films that played there. They don't have U.S. release dates yet (except as noted), but we'll let you...
"That movie seemed very pleased with itself." That was a non-critic friend's assessment of Kingsman: The Golden Circle immediately after the screening, and it's such an apt description that I have stolen it without attribution.
Whatever you...
It's immediately clear that Mother! is not to be taken literally, as it starts with a reverse time-lapse of a rotting corpse in a bed forming back into a sleeping Jennifer Lawrence. That sort of thing doesn't happen literally, not where I come...
It is very long for a horror movie (135 minutes), yet covers only half of the Stephen King novel it's based on, yet is full of half-mentioned details that seem to have been crammed in hurriedly. I guess it's fitting that a nostalgic tale set in a...
A handful of innocent sheep are stalked by a coyote at the beginning of Wind River, an intense, somber mystery-thriller set on the Wyoming Indian reservation of that name. But the coyote is soon dispatched by a greater predator, or at least a...
Steven Soderbergh tried to retire a few years ago, but it didn't take. Perhaps he can relate to Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), the lovable West Virginian ne'er-do-well at the center of Logan Lucky who tries to make an honest living but keeps...
Annabelle: Creation is a prequel to Annabelle, which was a spinoff of The Conjuring, which was about the work of a pair of real-life paranormal investigators who really did once have a case involving a creepy doll. Now, at last, we can learn...
Detroit is about one of the more unpleasant things to have happened in a city where so many unpleasant things have happened that you can elicit a feeling of despair just by naming your movie after it. ("Wanna go see Detroit?" "No, that sounds...
To the extent that there are James Bonds in the real world -- dashing, highly skilled secret agents who can kill enemies with a rolled-up newspaper -- surely by now there are also Jane Bonds. Yet Hollywood has offered few lady spies worthy of the...
With Dunkirk, writer-director Christopher Nolan, most famous for his Batman trilogy but even better at mind-benders like Memento and Inception, applies his cerebral skillset to another familiar genre: the World War II movie. Rather than turn the...
There isn't much battle action in War for the Planet of the Apes, but it still feels like a war movie -- a World War II movie, specifically, set largely in a wintry prison camp, with some captives collaborating with the enemy in the vain hope of...
Some superhero movies have subtitles referring to the dramatic events or villains featured therein: Apocalypse, The Age of Ultron, Civil War, The Last Stand. Then there's Spider-Man: Homecoming, which refers to a dance at Peter Parker's high...
Admittedly, Baby Driver employs a gimmick. Written and directed by the impossibly clever Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), the film's main character is a getaway driver who times his crew's bank robberies to be in sync with...
A few weeks back, film critics and pop-culture writers were all in a tizzy over a troubling report that the new Transformers had a running time of 182 minutes. This was swiftly debunked — by no less an authority than director Michael Bay, who...
Pixar's first bad movie, Cars 2, erred in making Mater the tow truck the main character and in emphasizing a tired espionage caper over jokes. Pixar's second bad movie, Cars 3, fixes those mistakes and replaces them with different ones. This...
