Venice 2025: “The Smashing Machine”

In Benny Sadfie’s anti-sports biopic The Smashing Machine, Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) is always fighting, whether he’s inside the ring or outside it. Inside, the battle is simpler to define. The one-on-one combats are rough and bloody, knees jamming into heads and fists smushing into faces; participants often walk away with concussions or wounds that […]

Review: “The Fall Guy”

It started at the Oscars. When Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt teamed up to present a salute to the stunt community at this year’s Academy Awards (an odd bit of promotion considering that no Oscar for stunt work currently exists and there’s no evidence of it coming on the horizon), their playful ribbing of each […]

Review: “Oppenheimer”

It’s a thorny subject, one usually entered into with reticence. That the United States military’s dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end a war that was already effectively over was a horrid act is more of a fact than an opinion nowadays. Upwards of 200,000 […]

Review: “Jungle Cruise”

I was in the audience at the Walt Disney Studios panel at the D23 Expo in 2019 when some of the first footage from “Jungle Cruise”—an adventure film based on the Disney Parks attraction of the same name—was premiered. But it was less the trailers themselves that made an impact, and more the surprising and […]

Review: “A Quiet Place Part II”

So many of my memories of movies are inextricably linked to watching them in the theater. I don’t necessarily believe that a movie is better or worse depending on where and how you watch it. But the experience around watching a movie at home, on your TV, on a computer, in crowded a theater, in […]

Review: “Mary Poppins Returns”

3.5 out of 5 stars. Walt Disney’s 1964 film “Mary Poppins” is hugely beloved and widely regarded as the studio’s greatest live-action movie. So despite the fact that author P.L. Travers wrote multiple stories about the magical nanny, it’s still a tall order for Disney to make a sequel to the classic film over 50 […]

Review: “The Girl on the Train”

1.5 out of 5 stars. It can be difficult to erase a book’s influence from your mind when watching its film adaptation, but let’s real: some stories, no matter how great they are, just don’t work in film form. Case in point: Paula Hawkins’ bestselling thriller “The Girl on the Train.” Directed by Tate Taylor, […]