Not all Christmas movies need to be great art. The Hallmark Channel, Lifetime and even Netflix have proven that for every The Bishop’s Wife or It’s a Wonderful Life, there’s also a place for improbable romantic cheese involving holiday spirit and a strategically placed sprig of mistletoe. Sometimes, you just need something sweet. The Paul […]

In a way, The Irishman speaks to the odd crossroads where we find ourselves in the midst of the streaming wars. It’s been said, and accurately, that one of Netflix’s strengths is the ability to greenlight the kind of content that traditional film studios usually don’t. It’s likely that most studios relying on theatrical release […]

The opening of Graham Swon’s debut feature, The World is Full of Secrets, is intriguing and odd: a shadowy background of flowery wallpaper with a voiceover from what sounds like a health education film from the 1950s. A man’s proper English voice describes how “the mind of a teenage girl” is special — the film […]

Kasi Lemmons’ Harriet is a biopic about abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman that feels as if it were made not in 2019 but the 1990s. It’s part of an old-school subset of movies based on true events that work more as history lessons than as cinema. Think, for example, of Apollo 13 (1995) or Amistad (1997) […]

Winnipeg, Canada, has produced more than its share of strange and singular filmmakers. Guy Maddin is likely the most well-known, but Manitoba’s capital has also issued forth George Toles (Maddin’s frequent screenwriter), John Paizs (writer/director/star of the unclassifiable “Colour Crime Movie” Crime Wave), the Astron-6 film collective (makers of Manborg and The Editor), and Nia […]

In Countdown, the mildly stupid teen horror flick about a phone app that tells you how long you have to live, it’s not the app that kills you. The app doesn’t have any control over your lifespan, either, which is to say, the act of asking has no effect on the answer. The app is […]

Greener Grass is an absurdist suburban satire written and directed by Upright Citizens Brigade alumnae Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, populated with like-minded sketch-and-improv workhorses (including SNL’s Beck Bennett), everyone clearly having a good time doing their weird things. It’s set in a sunny, artificial, candy-colored world with manicured lawns and interchangeable husbands (I mean […]

Another one of this week’s unnecessary sequels is Zombieland: Double Tap, a hit-or-miss follow-up to the perfectly good 2009 comedy that brings back the original cast of post-zombie-apocalypse survivors just to put them through the same paces as last time. If the dizzying amount of change the world has experienced in the last 10 years […]

Once upon a time (wait, actually just this week), Disney released a live-action sequel that literally no one asked for that actually seemed to boast a pretty compelling premise. Hitting theaters just in time for Halloween, and with a perfectly Halloween-ready title to boot, Maleficent: Mistress of Darkness — the sequel to 2014’s Maleficent — […]