Review: “Mother!”

3.5 out of 5 stars. You’d be hard-pressed to find a mainstream movie in theaters this year that is more insane than Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!”, or a movie that will make you feel more insane by the time the credits roll. The psychological horror film (an unusually arty release to come from a mainstream studio), […]

Review: “It” (2017)

4 out of 5 stars. “It” opens with one of the most famous and controversial scenes from Stephen King’s novel. Six-year-old Georgie Denbrough from the small town of Derry is chasing a paper boat in the rain, when it floats into a gutter. As he goes to retrieve it, Georgie is confronted by a […]

The 5 Best Movies of the Summer

I’ve been taking a break from watching and reviewing current films for a bit, as we ease out of summer and into fall. This time of year is one of the slowest for big movie releases, but even this summer at its peak was one of the slowest ones box office-wise in recent memory. Despite […]

Review: “The Big Sick”

4.5 out of 5 stars. Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl. Boy loses girl. Girl falls into a coma. It sounds like a plot whipped up just for film, but it actually is the real-life love story of Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon—which they then turned into a screenplay for a […]

Review: “Dunkirk”

4 out of 5 stars. Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” begins with an unexpected quietness, as a group of British soldiers roam the streets of that all-but-abandoned French city that, as the text at the beginning of the film states, is the site of the Allied soldiers’ retreat after the 1940 invasion of France by Nazi Germany. […]

Review: “War for the Planet of the Apes”

5 out of 5 stars. With an abundance of computer-generated characters populating most modern movies, pushing for realism seems to be the goal of most studios. Too often are viewers taken out of a movie, however briefly, by characters and effects that are realistic, but not realistic enough to exist seamlessly with the real people […]

Review: “Spider-Man: Homecoming”

4 out of 5 stars. The number of film incarnations of “Spider-Man” to come out in the last 15 years, regardless of what you think of them, is ridiculous. In “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” Tom Holland becomes the third actor to take on the role of the web-slinging hero in a live-action movie, following on the heels of […]

Review: “The Beguiled” (2017)

4 out of 5 stars. It’s amazing what different writers and directors can bring to—or take away from—the same story. Case in point, “The Beguiled,” a 1971 film directed by Don Siegel, based on a novel of the same name. That movie, set during the American Civil War, starred Clint Eastwood as John, an injured […]

Review: “Despicable Me 3”

3.5 out of 5 stars. The “Despicable Me” films have always been rather all over the place—that’s not a bad thing in this case though, and for the record I really do like the first two movies. But despite all the colorful gadgets and cartoonish supervillains and yellow sidekicks, at their heart they’ve always been […]

Review: “Baby Driver”

5 out of 5 stars. A car pulls up to a bank. Three well-dressed but obviously crooked people get out and enter the building. A robbery ensues, and the criminals run back out to their car, their driver making a speedy getaway. Many movies have had similar openings, but it’s obviously from a couple minutes […]