Review: “The King of Staten Island”

It’s a credit to “The King of Staten Island” that it stars two comedians I’m personally not a fan of, and yet I still immensely enjoyed not only the film, but the characters they played. The new comedy/drama from writer/director Judd Apatow (who co-wrote the screenplay with Dave Sirus and star Pete Davidson) possesses some […]

Review: “Babyteeth”

A romance with a terminally ill teen is practically a subgenre within the universe of young adult novels and films, often weepy, often tender, and often dwelling a lot on the illness itself. “Babyteeth,” a new release from IFC Films and the debut feature from director Shannon Murphy, is none of those things. “Babyteeth” centers […]

Review: “Da 5 Bloods”

On a surface level, Spike Lee’s newest joint, “Da 5 Bloods,” is about Black Vietnam War veterans reuniting and reopening their traumatic past. It’s a perspective of the war that never gets represented on screen. But in that special way that only he has, Lee connects the struggles of the past, present, and future in […]

Review: “Artemis Fowl”

I’ve been waiting for an “Artemis Fowl” movie for almost 20 years. I picked up the first book in the fantasy series by Eoin Colfer when I was in middle school and immediately became an avid fan, devouring each of the subsequent seven books in the series as soon as they were released. But whether […]

Review: “Shirley”

Writer Shirley Jackson is perhaps best known for her horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, widely regarded as one of the best and scariest ghost stories ever written. But Jackson’s personal life becomes a sort of horror story of its own in “Shirley,” a new drama based on the novel by Susan Scarf Merrell […]

Streaming Recap: May 2020

Normally at this time of year we’d be a month into the summer blockbuster season. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing state of things, that is not the case. But we still have lots of movies to stream at home in the meantime. You can read my reviews of films that debuted on streaming services in […]