A movie about grown-ups playing hide and seek is out now, hot on the heels of last year’s movies about people people playing tag and truth or dare. Naturally, one wonders: What other childhood games could be turned into movies? I took a trip down memory lane and came up with these beloved pastimes that […]
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The rich sure do love their rituals, huh? That’s something that Ready or Not heroine Grace (Samara Weaving) finds out incredibly early on in her marriage to gaming heir Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien) in Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s intricately crafted, gory-as-all-get-out haunted hunted house thriller. It’s all fun and, uh, games until someone […]
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The idea of people pushed to their limits serves as the bedrock for countless works of art, from revenge tragedies to superhero blockbusters. But the idea that someone can learn the most about themselves in extreme circumstances is itself pushed to the limits in two films celebrating their 40th anniversaries this year. Francis Ford Coppola’s […]
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I’ll tell you what, the only thing a critic enjoys more than a good movie is a good movie that’s a surprise. The Angry Birds Movie (2016) was a miserable affair reverse-engineered to explain why the birds in the popular smartphone game were slingshotting one another at pigs — something nobody needed to know and […]
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Summer 2019’s incredibly claustrophobic B-movie creature features are all about doubling — or even tripling — down on danger. First, there was Crawl, which combined giant hungry alligators with a Category 5 hurricane (and trapped its protagonist inside a creepy crawl space). And now we have 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, in which Johannes Roberts and […]
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Remember Elizabethtown? If not, let me refresh your memory. Back in 2005, Cameron Crowe’s would-be opus was widely panned by critics and audiences alike. I remember finding a lot to like in Crowe’s textured, deeply personal tale of personal discovery in the wake of grief, but it’s also one of the most frustrating, unfocused films […]
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The characters in Good Boys were born the year Superbad came out (2007), so they probably don’t realize they’re living in a remake of it. The girls in Booksmart didn’t know, either. No one can say why Superbad is the 2000s raunch-com that’s inspiring filmmakers in 2019, but we now have two fine updates — one […]
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Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood introduces its title character during his days operating on the fringes of the Los Angeles theater scene in the late 1940s. As the film opens, Ed’s directing a performance of his own World War II-themed play, The Casual Company, at an obscure little playhouse with a leaking roof. Onstage, […]
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Though Alvin Schwartz’s books were published between 1981 and 1991 and had timeless settings, the movie version of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is set in 1968 — at Halloween, specifically, which means it’s also a few days before the election of Richard Nixon. Something wicked this way comes indeed. There’s some socio-political subtext […]
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(Editor’s note: This piece is about moviegoing in a European capital that most of our readers probably haven’t been to, but the nostalgia and cinephilia on display are universally relatable.) The sound of the dinosaurs made the room tremble. It also shook slightly whenever they walked, especially the T. Rex and especially when it roared. […]
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In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Sharon Tate gleefully catches a showing of her biggest movie yet — The Wrecking Crew. It’s a great scene. Too many people are talking about that already. So let’s talk about The Wrecking Crew and the proto-Austin Powers franchise it brought to an end. This is […]
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Life is a lot like racing cars, as you know if you read Garth Stein’s dependably sappy novel The Art of Racing in the Rain. The movie version, directed by Simon Curtis (Goodbye Christopher Robin) from Mark Bomback’s faithfully adapted screenplay, shares all the same folksy, vaguely New Age-y life lessons (which range from profound […]
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