Assassination Nation, based on the hashtags #woke and #metoo, is an in-your-face, self-consciously edgy satire about a town called Salem that goes witch-hunting after everyone’s online accounts are hacked and their secrets (and nude pics) are exposed. The primary target of everyone’s ire is Lily (Odessa Young), an above-it-all high-schooler who’s blamed for the hack, […]

Unlike the late entries in some horror franchises, The Predator doesn’t pretend any of its predecessors didn’t happen, but you don’t need to have seen them, either. Directed and co-written by Shane Black (who was an actor in the original 1987 Predator), this gory, quippy sequel assumes you’ll easily catch up if you’re not familiar with […]

Based on Darcey Bell’s novel, which must have been inspired by Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, A Simple Favor is a funny, dark-edged, lurid mystery-melodrama starring Anna Kendrick as a naive stay-at-home mom named Stephanie Smothers who turns detective when her hoity-toity best friend Emily Nelson (Blake Lively) goes missing. Eschewing the “females in peril” formula for […]

It’s unlikely (I hope) that the Wershe family of Detroit will remind you of your own clan. As portrayed in White Boy Rick, a compelling if familiar fact-based drama set in 1984-88, the Wershes are low-class ignoramuses, the type of family where the dad (Matthew McConaughey) and his junkie teenage daughter (Bel Powley) can be […]

Mandy stars Nicolas Cage, with Andrea Riseborough as his wife, the two of them living a lumberjack’s life in the Pacific Northwest in 1983. Intercut with scenes of their idyllic existence, reading fantasy novels and talking about which planets are their favorites, are scenes of a cult leader (Linus Roache) and his dimwit followers occupying the […]