Category Archives: Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news

If nothing else, streaming has provided a welcoming home to a lot of holiday films in recent years, with movies ranging from bad to Hall Mark Christmas romance mediocre typically skipping theaters altogether. Cramming these seasonal-shelf-life pictures in theaters makes … Continue reading →

Hannah Arrendt’s famous phrase “The Banality of Evil,” gets beaten to death by anyone trying to describe the ordinary folk who commit extraordinary crimes, be they fictional villains or political, military or historically genocidal figures who shock the world both … Continue reading →

Action auteur John Woo returns to the sort of gangland tale that made him for “Silent Night,” a holiday shoot-em-up with a pun for its title. A month or so back, David Fincher made a hit-man thriller that was so … Continue reading →

“Godzilla Minus One” is an ambitious reset of the famed Japanese movie monster, a reboot of the franchise and the character introduced in the 1950s as an allegory of Japanese victimhood in in the nuclear age. Writer-director and effects supervisor … Continue reading →

A first trailer that has exposition/back story, the cinema’s “It Girl” Anya Taylor-Joy, and a WHOLE lot of stuff we’ve seen in other Mad Max movies. I mean, a lot. Looks very good and all. But will it show us … Continue reading →

“In Your Dreams” is a shiny but drab Turkish romantic fantasy about two people who “dream” they wake up married, have a child and lives together, and spend much of their time together trying to figure out how this mystery … Continue reading →

Simmer down, now. This derivative, dumb and ditzy body switch comedy that ups the “Freaky Friday,” “13 Going on 30” and “18 Again” ante by serving up a whole “Family Switch” is harmless. No, it’s not the least bit original. … Continue reading →

In light of the mockery of “Black Trauma Porn” in “American Fiction,” it’s hard to see the Simon Steuri drama “How I Learned to Fly” as anything but that. A downbeat story of two parentless, soon-to-be homeless siblings struggling to … Continue reading →

Multiple generations celebrated Henry Winkler’s late life Emmy Award for his performance as a bad actor turned bad acting teacher in Bill Hader’s hitman dramedy “Barry” on HBO. The guy had been a short, strutting TV icon in the ’70s, … Continue reading →

What a maddening, convoluted and bizarrely complex comic thriller “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me” is. Maybe it’s the passive “hero,” the muddled morass this Mexican college student in Barcelona finds himself trapped in, the holes in the narrative … Continue reading →