Monthly Archives: August 2021

Our endless fascination with “Lady Killer” Ted Bundy means we’ve seen a lot of handsome look-alikes play him on the screen, from Mark Harmon and Cary Elwes to Zac Efron, each taking a shot at a mass-murderer with cover boy … Continue reading →

It’s never wholly fair to dismiss a movie just because it’s unpleasant to sit through. But that’s a good place to start with “We Need to Do Something.” This horror star vehicle for Sierra McCormick (“Pretty Little Stalker,” “American Horror … Continue reading →

The dog days of August, traditionally the cinema’s dumping ground for dogs, is the first stretch of the movie calendar to return to “normal.” “The Night House” got good reviews and didn’t do diddly with the horror fangirls and fanboys. … Continue reading →

A tale of boy-meets-girl, girl-wrecks-boys-life told with sublime melancholy by Japanese auteur Kôji Fukada, “The Real Thing” plays like the darkest “romantic comedy” you ever saw. A “love story” with melodramatic complications and coincidences, and confrontations that border on bizarre, … Continue reading →

“When I’m a Moth” is a fictional, myth-making and myth-puncturing look at a brief interlude in Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s early life, a summer she spent “sliming salmon” at a fish cannery in Valdez, Alaska. It’s a talky, mulling-things-over sort of … Continue reading →

“The Secret Diary of an Exchange Student” works itself into a lather for its finale, briefly becoming a door-slamming farce with a college applicant who faces deportation, his dismayed college admissions interviewer, a cadre of anti-deportation protestors, sheriff’s deputies, a … Continue reading →

The stark desert north of Sudan is realistically and beautifully captured in Amjad Abu Alala’s “You Will Die at Twenty,” a potent parable for life in this war torn and timelessly backward corner of the world. A Sudanese entry in … Continue reading →

Smart sci fi, good cast. This looks good.

A grieving, sullen and silent tween is sent off to visit her Thai grandmother for the summer of “My Best Worst Adventure,” a moving and engaging kids’ movie with just enough hard edge to come off. It has that “Black … Continue reading →

The fundamental problem with any action pic starring Jason Momoa is who can you credibly cast that one could reasonably expect to bring down the Man Mountain? Making his character a mixed martial artist in “Sweet Girl” just compounds that … Continue reading →