No matter how hard they work, Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, and John Travolta can only star in so many direct-to-VOD thrillers a year, so someone has to pick up the slack. Guy Pearce is that someone in Disturbing the Peace, a cheap, shoddy action movie from director York Alec Shackleton, whose only previous feature (2018’s […]
Read more
If cinema is, as Roger Ebert famously put it, a machine that generates empathy, the camera is its motor. What a director, editor, and cinematographer choose to show an audience, and the way they choose to frame it, communicates volumes about a movie’s themes and the filmmakers’ position on them. Sam Mendes’ WWI drama 1917 […]
Read more
It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke: Three Jesus Christs walk into a mental hospital, each claiming to be the real thing. But there’s nothing funny about Jon Avnet’s dreary period drama Three Christs, which is based on a real-life 1959 study about three paranoid schizophrenics in Michigan who all believed themselves to […]
Read more
The modern cinematic history of athlete cameos begins with a 7-foot-2 “airline pilot” grabbing a kid’s shirtfront like it’s a Kleenex. While no one would ever accuse Airplane! (1980) of realism, there’s a nugget of truth to NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s masquerading as co-pilot Roger Murdoch in the 1980 disaster spoof. In the scene, a […]
Read more
Based on my own research. Films included only if they played theatrically. Corrections and additions are welcome (@ me). For comparison’s sake, here are the 2018 and 2017 editions. Total wide releases (600+ theaters): 146 Sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, and franchises: 40 Based on a true story (BOATS): 19 Based on novels: 16 Based on comic […]
Read more
The more I do this, the more it seems wrong to call these the “best” movies when I only saw a fraction of the entries. Well over 1,300 new films were released in the U.S. this year; I saw a couple hundred of them. And that’s just the U.S.! So it should be “Best Movies […]
Read more
1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There were countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the overlooked gems from 1999 — the weird, ungainly, or […]
Read more
With over one hundred years separating World War I and the present day, cinema has consistently had to find new ways of depicting it for modern audiences who, unlike moviegoers in the first half of the 20th century, have no personal connection to it. Early films about World War I are defined by two elements. […]
Read more
We had some of our regular contributors suggest movies from this year that flew under the radar or aren’t getting enough end-of-the-year attention. Here they are, in alphabetical order: Climax [Craig J. Clark] The Death of Dick Long [Bill Bria] Fast Color [Josh Bell] Freaks [Audrey Fox] Happy Death Day 2U [Joseph Allen] Jawline [Marshall […]
Read more
One need only turn on CNN, check Twitter, or look to this year’s Golden Globes nominations to see that the fragility of the male ego is at the front and center of the zeitgeist. That most stories are about men is, problematically, nothing new. What’s new is that their psyches are under the microscope at […]
Read more
With all the big budget, heavily franchised stories of people with special powers (mutants, as they might uncharitably be called), it’s refreshing to see that it’s still possible to create a low budget, intimately crafted version of the same sort of story. Chloe (Lexy Kolker) is a young girl who lives with her father (Emile […]
Read more
Starring Jack Quaid (son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid) and Maya Erskine, Plus One is a charming romantic comedy that has flown under the radar of many audiences but should be watched by all fans of the genre. Ben and Alice are the sort of old friends from college that have, for some reason, […]
Read more