On the surface, it would be almost too easy to dismiss the women of Widows as oblivious, naive, helpless, or – worst of all – dumb. But therein lies the brilliance and thematic intricacy of Steve McQueen’s latest film – a ferocious and sophisticated reimagining of the BBC miniseries that starred Helen Mirren. McQueen’s Widows moves the […]

The Front Runner, Jason Reitman’s political dramedy and light satire about Gary Hart, is set in a quaint, bygone era when adultery could derail a politician’s career and when there were no news networks trying to fill 24 hours of programming each day. Things are different now, but the film, mostly a straightforward account of […]

Hard to imagine what could have given filmmakers in 2018 the idea that moviegoers want to see Nazis get killed, but hey, we’ll take ’em. Overlord, a violent, horror-tinged, sci-fi take on Germany’s World War II atrocities, recalls the Nazisploitation flicks of the ’60s and ’70s grindhouse circuit, except that it’s from the point of […]

It’s a tale as old as time — or at least as old as 1957, when Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was first published: A mean, green, potbellied curmudgeon comes up with a plan to steal Christmas from his annoyingly festive neighbors. Despite a contemporary soundtrack punctuated by hip-hop tracks, the new animated […]

From the opening credits, it’s clear that director Fede Alvarez hopes audiences will draw comparisons between The Girl in the Spider’s Web and the James Bond films. With its overly stylish opening credits, Alvarez’s sorta-sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn’t so much interested in evoking its predecessor (why bother?) as it is […]

I’m far from the first one to point this out, but Bohemian Rhapsody — a biopic of Freddie Mercury (and, to a lesser extent, the band he fronted, known as Queen) — is the sort of watered-down pablum that should be embarrassed to show its face in a world where Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story exists. Somewhat […]

My understanding of battle rap — informed entirely by Joseph Kahn’s Bodied, a devastatingly funny social commentary — is that it’s like a no-holds-barred comedy roast except the jokes have to rhyme, with participants insulting each other in loosely metered couplets that may be either improvised or prepared. As in a roast, every aspect of […]