A lot of great art has been made about random but life-changing interactions between total strangers. Richard Linklater’s ’90s indie romance Before Sunrise is just one example of what can happen when you set two attractive young people on a collision course and follow them as they spent a full day walking and talking. (Does […]

John Wick’s first line of dialogue in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum is an instruction to a taxi driver: “The New York Public Library.” How cool that an elite assassin is also a reader! Shortly after arriving at the library, he kills someone with a book. This is also cool. Look, we contain multitudes. […]

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. […]

(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 […]

(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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]