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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Here’s the thing about movie endings that are intentionally left open to interpretation: They only work if the audience leaves the theater believing (correctly or otherwise) that the writer and/or director did in fact secretly have an ending in mind. Especially where thrillers are concerned: Catch one too many red herrings on your fishing line […]

Making a live-action adaptation of Nickelodeon’s long-running animated series Dora the Explorer was always going to be a bit tricky. The award-winning show is a sweet one — and a major coup for Latino representation (especially when it started back in 2000) — but it’s still an unabashedly educational program starring a 7-year-old and watched […]