Few actors are better suited to play a diplomat than Jon Hamm, and the erstwhile Don Draper brings his gregarious A-game to Beirut, a compelling espionage flick directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Session 9) and written by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, the Jason Bourne series). We first meet Hamm’s glad-handing Mason Skiles in 1972, […]

Based on the infamous 1969 incident in which a young woman drowned after a probably-drunk Sen. Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge into a pond, Chappaquiddick is unusual for a docudrama in that its point of view is different from its main character’s. Our protagonist, 37-year-old Kennedy (played by Jason Clarke in big white […]

It’s laudable to convert harmless childhood games into horror premises, but Truth or Dare does it with such rote blandness that the movie is actually less suspenseful than a real game of truth or dare. Directed by Jeff Wadlow (Cry_Wolf, Kick-Ass 2) from a screenplay credited to him and three other people, the film is meant […]

Rampage is one of the better video-game-based movies, a low bar that it clears only by forsaking the entire premise of the game. The mid-80s arcade hit had one objective: with a giant gorilla, giant lizard, or giant wolf as your avatar, you destroy every building and eat every civilian you can get your hands or […]

As a proponent of the “shut up and watch the movie” school of thought, I have a special fondness for films that actively encourage silence. The tense and thrilling A Quiet Place does it by putting its characters in a situation where making noise is fatal and then making us forget that it’s only a movie. […]

It is a time-honored tradition that teens in movies make pacts with one another to lose their virginity, but seldom are those teens female girls of the young lady gender! That makes Blockers different from the typical raunch-com — that, and the fact that it was directed and edited with some discipline and seems to have […]