The self-cannibalization at Disney continues with Dumbo, a turgid, labored, bloated live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with precisely none of the original's emotion, charm, or joy. Why do these things that are obviously bad ideas to begin with keep turning out so bad? It is a...

Coming-out stories have become common enough that movies are starting to tell them with nuance. The "Am I gay?" question no longer has only two possible answers; there's a whole spectrum, as 17-year-old Franky Winter (Josh Wiggins) discovers in Giant Little Ones, a discreet and decidedly...

An apocalyptic event happens so subtly in Starfish that you almost don't notice it. The reasons for that are probably more practical than artistic -- it costs money to show widespread devastation -- but it adds to the intrigue of this melancholy sci-fi drama, which can feel both realistic and...

Jordan Peele, the newly minted horror auteur behind Get Out, gives us a lot to process in the early minutes of his follow-up, the suspenseful and more overtly horrific Us. We're told of a network of underground tunnels in the United States (the "U.S." of the title?); images of rabbits in cages...

One thing you can say for sure about Relaxer: There will never be a gender-swapped remake of it. The story, first juvenile and then surreal, only makes sense in the context of men's craving for competition and willingness to spend absurd amounts of time and energy on total nonsense. That's not to...

This time last year, Hereditary was already being heralded as the best horror film of 2018 following screenings at Sundance and SXSW. And just one year prior, Get Out was praised as one of the best horror films of all time following its premiere at Sundance. Both festivals often yield some of the...

Our ongoing and long-overdue reckoning with sexual abuse and harassment has inspired a new wave of cinema; not only are we seeing more empowering and diverse representations of women and minority groups, but we’re seeing stories that reckon with the root cause of so much of this abuse: toxic...

The disease in Five Feet Apart, the latest romantic drama about two teens in love where at least one of them has an incurable disease, is cystic fibrosis, and they both have it. They meet in the hospital. Stella (Haley Lu Richardson), our chipper, somewhat obsessive-compulsive, video-blogging...

Captive State is geeky, serious sci-fi told with a straight face and no comic relief. This is essential because, like most geeky sci-fi, it's a hair's breadth from cheesiness: A few missteps and the whole thing becomes a campy laughingstock. But director Rupert Wyatt, who made the similarly...

The setting of Wonder Park, a goopy pile of trash made by a third-tier animation studio, is an amusement park called ... Wonderland. Why isn't the movie called Wonderland? Probably because there are so many other "Wonderland" movies, most of them Alice-related. So why isn't the park called Wonder...

Over the past few years coming-of-age films have thankfully moved away from typical male-centric stories about teen boys getting drunk and trying to hook up with girls. The genre has come a long way from American Pie and Porky’s, the casual misogyny of the former and the blatant sexism of the...

The plucky, rough-around-the-edges Canadian thriller Level 16 is a Black Mirror-lite story about teenage girls being trained in a creepy, militaristic sort of finishing school called the Vestalis Academy and located in a secret fortified bunker. The girls, about a dozen of them, spend every waking...

Many of the people seeing Captain Marvel (myself included) won't know anything about the character going in except that she's from Marvel Comics and that you'd think she'd be a bigger deal given that she's named after the company. After seeing the movie, a middling, good-enough episode in the...

In the loudly menacing The Hole in the Ground, a solid debut from Irish director Lee Cronin, young mother Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her son, Chris (James Quinn Markey), have just moved to an isolated house in the country -- which, not to blame the victims here, never turns out well. Their house...

We're so accustomed to stalker movies now that they can be told in shorthand. Greta is a too-efficient example of this, in addition to being a cautionary tale about why you should never do something nice for a stranger. Directed by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) from a screenplay credited to him...