This week’s “good enough, I guess, if you’re not too picky” home-invasion thriller is Breaking In,”which offers the innovative twist of the bad guys getting inside and holding the kids captive while the mom is locked outside and has to “break in,” as it were. What will those geniuses in Hollywood come up with next?! […]

You’ll think you’ve seen Life of the Party before, or at least something very much like it: A dowdy, newly divorced mom goes back to college to finish her degree — and it’s the same college her daughter is attending! Collision course with wackiness, no? Mom embarrasses daughter, whose friends think Mom is fun; Mom realizes […]

The rape-revenge sub-genre has many entries, and everything about Revenge (including the title) sounds derivative until you get to the credits. How many movies on this topic were written and directed by women? This one, a cool, synth-scored empowerment anthem from French first-timer Coralie Fargeat, turns the exploitation model on its head by delivering more male […]

There are two premises in Bad Samaritan, one that drives the plot and one that explains the villain’s motives. They are middling premises, better than some you’ve heard, less creative than others. They’re executed with average skill by director Dean Devlin, the longtime schlock writer (Independence Day, Godzilla [1998]) who made his behind-the-camera debut with last […]

Diablo Cody’s screenwriting career started with a pregnant teenager named Juno. She returns to the subject of maternity with Tully, but there’s a crucial difference this time: Cody has three kids of her own now, an experience that informs her painfully funny and sympathetic portrait of postpartum exhaustion. She’s reunited with Juno director Jason Reitman, and […]

Any remake of the 1987 Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell “romantic” “comedy” Overboard would have to reverse the genders. A single father of three rowdy boys tricking a rich, mean amnesiac woman into believing she’s his wife — that is to say, cook, nanny, and housekeeper — feels cruel and misogynistic now. We do NOT gaslight women in […]

Some movies provide so much vivid detail about a character that you could practically write a biography. Lynne Ramsay’s mesmerizing You Were Never Really Here (based on Jonathan Ames’ novel) is a different sort of experience, immersing us in impressions and emotions while offering only glimpses of factual details. We never learn our protagonist’s last name […]

There are no literal hauntings in Ismael’s Ghosts, a wry, lyrical, but often plodding drama from director Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale), only metaphorical ones. Freewheeling French filmmaker Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), who shares Desplechin’s hometown of Roubaix, is in the process of simultaneously shooting and rewriting a new movie when he and his girlfriend, […]