With basic-cable production values and an exceedingly generic story, The Darkest Minds is the latest teenage dystopian fantasy film based on a trilogy of young adult novels in which a girl learns she is Very Special and becomes a leader in the fight against oppression. It’s harmless — unless you’re upset by the idea of children […]

Disney’s Christopher Robin is not a biography of Christopher Robin Milne, the boy featured in his father A.A.’s Winnie-the-Pooh books. There was a movie last year, Goodbye, Christopher Robin, that told that story (more or less). This Disney version pretends we don’t know anything about the real Christopher Robin and tells a fictional story about the […]

The two main characters in The Spy Who Dumped Me are ordinary women who get caught up in international espionage and turn out to be — what are the odds? — pretty good at it. They shoot villains with relative ease and accuracy, instinctively hide flash drives in their privates, pull switcheroos as if native-born to […]

Tom Cruise has been starring in Mission: Impossible movies for 22 years, and his character, un-killable super-spy Ethan Hunt, has been on the job for about the same length of time. Hunt isn’t an archetype like James Bond, kept forever young(-ish) by recasting the role and disregarding continuity. The things that happened to thirtysomething Ethan Hunt […]

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, the very meta big-screen adaptation of the Cartoon Network series Teen Titans Go!, is about a quintet of adolescent superheroes seeking to earn the same respect their adult counterparts get by doing what so many of them have done: starring in a movie. The idea occurs to the team […]

It would seem rapper and activist Boots Riley watched a few Michel Gondry movies (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, etc.) and decided to make a whimsical, alternate-reality satire of his own. It’s called Sorry to Bother You, and it is indeed his own. Though the inventive visual style and narrative absurdity […]