Review: “Space Jam: A New Legacy”

Like most kids who grew up in the 1990s, I have at least a tenuous nostalgic connection to “Space Jam,” the 1996 live action/animated hybrid that combined Looney Tunes characters with basketball star Michael Jordan in a story about defeating alien invaders through a basketball game. The movie may not have exactly been a critical […]

Review: “Pig”

“Pig” is not quite the movie I—and I think many others—expected it would be. Not that I necessarily had specific expectations for a film with such a bizarre premise: a forager (played by an exceedingly scruffy Nicolas Cage) travels from his isolated woodland existence to the city of Portland on a quest to recover his […]

Review: “Black Widow”

Regardless of your feelings on the dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the film industry, it does feel like a signal of some normalcy returning seeing an MCU film in the movie theaters for the first time since 2019’s “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” which immediately followed the franchise’s massive “Avengers: Endgame.” But what makes […]

Review: “Summertime”

The most memorable part of director Carlos López Estrada’s great 2018 debut film “Blindspotting” is its climax. Facing down the white police officer who he witnessed use lethal force on a Black man, Daveed Diggs’ Collin launches into a freestyle rap, in which he expresses his feelings on the relationship between the police and Black […]

Review: “Censor”

Censorship has played a role in film almost ever since the medium was invented. It takes different shapes and goes to varying extremes depending on the country and the time period. In Hollywood, for instance, the Production Code established to regulate content after the advent of the talking picture at the end of the 1920s […]

Review: “Zola”

“Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” Those words, attached to four selfies of herself with a white blonde woman, were posted on Twitter by Aziah “Zola” King in October 2015, kicking off a thread of 148 tweets detailing a […]

Review: “F9”

At some point, we’re all just going to have to stop questioning how much gas the “Fast & Furious” franchise has left in the tank and accept the fact that a series about fast cars and the people who push them beyond their limits isn’t slowing down anytime soon. And honestly, that’s fine by me. […]

Review: “Werewolves Within”

“Werewolves Within” isn’t like any video game adaptation I’ve ever seen. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that it was based on a video game until delving into its production after watching it. The 2016 VR game from Red Storm Entertainment and Ubisoft is set in a medieval town, where the user has to figure […]

Review: “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”

Few movies recently have broken my brain so thoroughly as “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” that mouthful of a clumsy title being just the first indicator of how inane this film is. If you saw its 2017 predecessor, “The Hitman’s Bodyguard,” then you have an idea of what this action comedy is like. Ryan Reynolds is […]

Review: “Luca”

Considering that the last released Pixar film, “Soul,” dealt with the most complicated and adult themes of any of the studio’s movies to date, their newest animated film, “Luca,” is a complete 360. But the simplicity of this sweet coming of age story is in some ways more beautifully realized than some of Pixar’s more […]