After suffering through last year’s wildly self-indulgent, overly serious Disobedience, I was ready to write off any and all “artistic but struggling 30-something adult comes home for the first time in years for a very important funeral and/or family tragedy and has important awakening” films for good. There’s really no end to the list of […]

Stuber is a familiar product — a violent action comedy about a civilian who gets dragged into police work — with a twist that’s more depressing than was probably intended. Kumail Nanjiani plays the nicknamed title character, beta-male Uber driver Stu, who is commandeered by Dave Bautista’s alpha-male cop Vic Manning, who just had Lasik surgery […]

I’ll say one thing for Crawl, the new gator caper clawing its way into theaters this weekend: It’s rather snappily paced. Clocking in at an easy, breezy 87 minutes, director Alexandre Aja’s film wastes absolutely zero time setting its scaly predators on its unsuspecting victims, who are trapped in a creepy crawl space under their […]

Back in 1982, an independent filmmaker named Jenny Bowen made a movie called Street Music, which centered around the working-class long-term residents of a San Francisco apartment building in the Tenderloin. The rent-controlled building — long neglected — gets acquired by a wealthy landlord who aims to “relocate” the tenants (many of whom are elderly […]

If books could always be accurately judged by their covers, the bespectacled, unassuming Ari Aster would be an accountant or an I.T. guy, not the fever-brained lunatic behind the deeply unsettling horror movie Hereditary — my favorite film of 2018 — and its followup, Midsommar, a sunlit pagan nightmare that is (deliberately) less scary but […]