If you’re looking for a recap of the Marvel Cinematic Universe facts you absolutely need to know before Avengers: Endgame, then face front, true believer: Here comes my mom, Lee Bria, to once again save the day. An MCU fan for several years now, she’s back to finish what she started last year, recapping a […]
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Timothy Treadwell was eaten by a bear. That’s usually what people remember about Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. The film delves into Treadwell’s obsession with grizzlies and his annual trips to the Alaskan wilderness to be close to them. These trips ended in the most gruesome of tragedies when he and his girlfriend Amie […]
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The R-rated Hellboy is a comedically gory but otherwise not particularly funny reboot of the comic book character (previously brought to PG-13-rated life by Ron Perlman and director Guillermo del Toro), a red-skinned, horned demon with a giant fist who works with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense to keep other monsters under control. […]
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Here’s an amusing coincidence. Little, which is a reversal of the Tom Hanks classic Big, was written by Tina Gordon Chism, who also wrote What Men Want, a reversal of What Women Want. Chism’s niche, apparently, is mediocre rewrites of fantasy comedies where the premise is reversed and the main characters are black women. All […]
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Missing Link is Laika’s fifth gorgeously detailed work of stop-motion animation and the fourth to leave me kind of cold. Only the studio’s debut, Coraline, had the intended impact; ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings were all wonderful to look at but offered no emotional connection. I feel bad not being moved by […]
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The interesting thing about anti-abortion propaganda film Unplanned is how little it tries to persuade anyone of anything. Preaching to the choir, it presupposes that everyone already agrees abortion is murder and that no further discussion is necessary to prove it. It also assumes you believe that Planned Parenthood is evil, and doesn’t get around to […]
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Contains spoilers for The Sixth Sense (1999), Psycho (1960), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Others (2001), Identity (2003), Basic (2003), The Village (2004), and The Gift (2000). It’s not like there had never been a twist ending before The Sixth Sense, you know? Thirty-nine years earlier, audiences lost their collective minds when the […]
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It’s been well-documented that the theatrical popularity of the documentary is back. Four films from 2018 — RBG, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Free Solo, and They Shall Not Grow Old** — now rank in the top 50 highest-grossing documentaries of all time (in the U.S.), while only four released in the prior three years […]
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Hollywood continues to solve racism one bigot at a time with The Best of Enemies, a shiny, shallow trinket based on true events that, in the hands of first-time feel-good filmmaker Robin Bissell, seem made-up. It’s 1971 in Durham, N.C., where the schools are still segregated and C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), head of the local […]
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(On HBO.) Little had to be changed about the plot of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son to make it work with an adaptation set in the present, but something must have been lost in translation. As directed by first-timer Rashid Johnson (a respected Chicago artist) from a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks (Girl 6), the story’s […]
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The title character in Hotel Mumbai is actually called the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, or the Taj for short, and it was one of a dozen Mumbai locations attacked by Islamic terrorists on November 26, 2008, ultimately killing 174 people and injuring hundreds more. The film, directed by first-timer Anthony Maras, follows the disaster-movie formula as […]
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The whole point of Pet Sematary — both Stephen King’s 1983 novel and the effective 1989 movie version — is that you shouldn’t revive the dead because they won’t be the same when they come back. (It’s one of those universal, timeless messages.) So it’s a little on the nose that the new adaptation, directed […]
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