Monthly Archives: March 2024

The great Mexican sensualist gets a first rate bio-doc treatment from some of the people who made “RBG.” This comes to Amazon Prime March 14.

Classic films give us cineliteracy. They change the way we look at every movie afterward, how we talk about films, and they grant us entry into a new way of seeing the world and the movies about it. Movies like … Continue reading →

Millie Bobby Brown doth not suffer in silence as the tormented, burned and embattled heroine of “Damsel.” A violent upending of women’s roles in fairytale fantasies, much of it is spent with her title character struggling to escape a dragon’s … Continue reading →

Box office prognosticators typically under-estimate kids’ cartoons’ Saturday ticket sales. And “Kung Fu Panda 4” is already outperforming expectations, with Deadline.com projecting a $55 million opening weekend, based on a robust $18 million+ Friday. Deadline and others’ Friday projections peaked … Continue reading →

Crowe and Karen Gillan, Marton Csokas and Tommy Flanagan star in this mystery/thriller based on the novel by E.O. Chirovici. Crowe plays an ex homocide detective with brain issues, memory problems and a possibly innocent man he wants to save. … Continue reading →

Dale Dickey also survives the end of the world. And Ella Purnell. And Kyle MacLachlan. At least for a bit. April 11. Prime.

Dated, comically corny but heavy-handed, pretty and production-designed to death but oh-so-sound-stagey, “Forbidden Planet” remains a touchstone film in the science fiction canon almost in spite of itself. A lot of its cachet relates to the Cold War zeitgeist that … Continue reading →

Mary Elizabeth Winstead co stars. The rest of the supporting cast isn’t familiar to me. Impressive looking production, based on a best seller, and not one by Ayn Rand. March 29 on Paramount+.

Short but slow, occasionally chilling but never quite scary, “Night Shift” is a straight-up genre thriller that embraces that most ancient and hallowed of horror tropes, “A lone woman menaced in the dark of night.” Poor pacing dooms this debut … Continue reading →

“Code 8” was an “X-Men on a Budget” thriller, reasonably well cast, with hunky mutants (not called “mutants”) and decent taser-finger effects. But it was an ungainly lump of a movie, clumsily trying to switch between criminal mutants, who are … Continue reading →