Stay with me here. A Dog’s Journey is a sequel to A Dog’s Purpose (2017), both based on novels by W. Bruce Cameron. They’re similar to A Dog’s Way Home (from earlier this year) but aren’t connected to it in any way except that A Dog’s Way Home was based on another, separate novel by W. […]
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(On Netflix.) The premise behind Wine Country is that SNL alumnae Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and Ana Gasteyer, and SNL writers Paula Pell and Emily Spivey, wanted to make a movie where the six of them could hang out. (Don’t worry, there’s a part for Tina Fey, too.) This sounds a lot like […]
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Even the devout keepers of the flame at Fangoria lost track of Fright Night Part II. First they reported an August 1988 release and featured it that month as if it were playing at a theater near you, then covered it again in September with the vague assurance it’d see the light of day in […]
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(In theaters and on Netflix.) It was inevitable that a former teen star from the Disney Channel would eventually play a serial killer, if not actually become one. Zac Efron, whose breakout performance in High School Musical was more than 13 years ago, is good as Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, […]
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Her Smell – writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s latest abrasive outing – opens with an oddly comforting image. We meet rock trio Something She in the early ’90s as they’re celebrating an appearance on the cover of Spin magazine before we cut abruptly to a few years later. The group’s front-woman, Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), has […]
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Amazing Grace, Aretha Franklin’s 1972 double-album of gospel songs, was the top-selling record of her career and the bestselling live gospel album of all time. (There might have been more live gospel albums than you realize.) It was recorded over two nights at a Baptist church in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, filmed by director Sydney Pollack […]
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In theory, I would absolutely love to see a comedy starring Diane Keaton, Pam Grier, and Rhea Perlman that hits out against the agist, sexist societal impulses that seek to relegate women into some sort of cosmic cast-off pile once they’re deemed “too old” to be appreciated (read: objectified). Lord only knows what they have […]
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The story and premise of The Hustle are so elegant in their simplicity that it’s no surprise this film has already been made twice: first as Bedtime Story (1964), with Marlon Brando and David Niven, then as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), with Steve Martin and Michael Caine. Directed by British TV guy Chris Addison and […]
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As neither a child of the ’90s, a current child, or a person who has ever played Pokemon, I am not the target audience for Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, a kid-focused, live-action PG adventure that assumes viewers are already familiar with Pokemon lore and have no unresolved questions. If you’re unclear on the relationship between Pokemon […]
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Like many VHS junkies of the ‘90s, my introduction to the Caped Crusader did not come from a comic book or campy television drama, but, rather, the weekend video rental. I vividly recall watching Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) as a youth and hearing that powerful, simple statement: “I’m Batman” — suddenly, I wanted to walk, […]
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Long Shot has the skeleton of a romantic comedy, but the flesh on those bones has a lot of flavors: political satire, odd-couple comedy, celebrity culture, and ’90 nostalgia, to name a few. The screenwriters are Dan Sterling, who wrote Seth Rogen and James Franco’s North Korea movie The Interview, and Liz Hannah, who co-wrote […]
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As is increasingly the case in modern cinema, groups underrepresented onscreen are having their stories told more frequently and more honestly than before. Women in particular were very well represented both in front of and behind the camera at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. As a result, there were a number of films that dealt […]
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