Review: “Encanto”

“Encanto” doesn’t see its heroine leave home on some grand quest. It doesn’t have a villain, or an action-packed climax. The 60th feature film from Walt Disney Animation is one of its most intimate, rarely leaving the area surrounding the sprawling, magical Colombian home of the Madrigal family, and barely interacting with any characters outside […]

Streaming Movie Reviews

Thanksgiving may have only just passed, but we’re already knee-deep into both awards season and holiday movie season. A lot of big movies have been released in November, and I’m running through some of the month’s new streaming releases below: four Netflix films, including an exciting western, the streamer’s biggest action movie to date, and […]

Review: “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”

Nostalgia-driven stories are one of the most frustrating aspects of so many recent sequels to and reboots of past franchises. On the one hand, they’re mostly harmless, and if people enjoy that, then so be it. On the other hand, it’s irritating and even a little sad to see studios and filmmakers exhibit such a […]

Review: “House of Gucci”

Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. In adapting Sara Gay Forden’s book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed for the big screen, director Ridley Scott (who has been circling this project since the early 2000s) and writers Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna only scratch the surface of the […]

SLIFF Reviews: Documentary Features

Today I’m sharing the second half of my recap of the St. Louis International Film Festival, this time concentrating on three documentary features: “Flee,” “Alien on Stage,” and “Citizen Ashe.” You can find my reviews of those movies below, and can read my reviews of some of the narrative features that played at SLIFF here. […]

SLIFF Reviews: Narrative Features

Over the last few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of attending the 30th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival, held in person and virtually from November 4-21. I watched a lot of really wonderful films, many of which will be released soon and look to be potential awards season contenders, and I wanted to […]

Review: “King Richard”

Why would you take the story of two of the most accomplished female athletes of all time and frame it from the perspective of a man—in this case, their father? That’s the question I found myself asking after the trailer for “King Richard,” a sports biopic directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green from a screenplay by […]

Review: “Belfast”

“Belfast” opens with a color shot of the Northern Ireland port city, the camera rising above the shipyards and eventually over a wall, peeking into a neighborhood street where kids play outside while the adults mingle. As we travel over this wall, we move from the present day to 1969, from color to black-and-white. These […]

Review: “C’mon C’mon”

A man reflecting on the life of his recently deceased father as he tries to pull his own life together. The story of a teenage boy and the group of women, including his free-spirited single mother, who raised him. Writer/director Mike Mills’ most recent feature films, 2010’s “Beginners” and 2016’s “20th Century Women,” are filled […]

Review: “Eternals”

“Eternals” opens in a manner that isn’t typical of any previous film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead of jumping straight into the action, an opening scroll details the mythos behind the story we are about to watch unfold. In 5000 B.C., ten super-powered beings known as the Eternals were sent to Earth by the […]