You know how sometimes a horror movie will have various creepy apparitions, and how it doesn’t really matter why those particular images were chosen, the point is just to be creepy? But then you know how sometimes a horror movie makes a lot of money, so Warner Bros. commissions sequels and prequels and spinoffs to […]
Read more
Arizona is a dark horror/comedy set after the housing collapse in 2009, an era that ought to have inspired more dark horror/comedies than it has. It stars Rosemarie DeWitt as a divorced mom in an Arizona suburb who’s about to lose her house while still working for the sleazy realtor (Seth Rogen) who sold it to […]
Read more
Cold Skin starts with the Nietzsche quote about how monster-hunters must beware lest they become monsters themselves, staring into the abyss may result in the abyss staring back at you, yada yada. It’s pretty on-the-nose for the story that ensues, which is based on a novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol and directed by Xavier Gens (Hitman), […]
Read more
This weekend, the female guerrilla rises again with the release of Peppermint, the story of a woman who wakes from a coma to get jacked and find the people who killed her family. Peppermint, aka Riley North (aka Jennifer Garner), hunts down and kills a lot of bad guys with knives, guns, and her bare […]
Read more
We’ve hit sort of a dry spell in the horror field these past few weeks. Not much in the way of theatrical releases, although you can still catch The Meg (Eric’s review) if the idea of Jason Statham beating up a prehistoric shark sounds amusing. (It is.) New on DVD, we got the quietly awesome […]
Read more
When teenage Margot (Michelle La) goes missing, her widowed father, David (John Cho), with whom she has always enjoyed a close relationship, realizes he doesn’t actually know any of her friends and has no idea where to start looking. Thus Searching is about a parent’s nightmare, made worse (like most things) by the internet, which proves to be […]
Read more
All is tranquil at the beginning of We the Animals before it evolves into a gentle, aching coming-of-age story for 10-year-old Jonah (Evan Rosado), who will soon learn that you have to take the moments of joy wherever you can find them. Up till now, it seemed like everything was joy. Jonah, an introspective boy who […]
Read more
Anarchic cartoons like the old Warner Bros. and Fleischer Studios shorts are always popular with children (even if many of them were not originally written for them) because they appeal to the fantasy of control. Children are not in control of their day-to-day lives, and these cartoons allow them to fantasize about a world where […]
Read more
When Amazon’s Jack Ryan series debuts this weekend, John Krasinski will become the fifth actor to play Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst in just under three decades. The new Ryan, pitted against Middle Eastern terrorists, comes four years after Chris Pine’s version faced off wit nefarious Russians in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Lost and nearly forgotten, […]
Read more
As we’ve seen, the end of Adolf Hitler didn’t mean the end of the Nazis. Those suckers are hardy! Operation Finale recounts how one of the Naziest of the Nazis, Adolf Eichmann, was found hiding in Buenos Aires in 1960 and captured by Israeli Mossad operatives, all under the nose of the Argentine government, which wasn’t […]
Read more
Here at Crooked Marquee, we are open to pitches from all writers, regardless of experience. Why, the number of pitches we get per week must be somewhere around [number that sounds impressive but plausible]! Many of these ideas are excellent, but a few bad ones slip through, too. Here’s a sampling of some of the […]
Read more
The Happytime Murders is a dismal execution of a great premise, in which puppets (think Muppets) live alongside humans in Los Angeles as second-class citizens, the way toons and people did in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. When the felt cast members of a popular ’90s TV show start dying, grizzled puppet P.I. Phil Philips (Bill […]
Read more