Review: “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”

It’s often beneficial to step back and observe life from a different perspective. In the case of Marcel, we get a shell’s eye view, but the outlook of this tiny, one-eyed shell creature wearing little shoes is remarkably incisive. “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” evolved from a series of three short films created by […]

Review: “Resurrection”

Many of us have one thing, one traumatic incident, of which the slightest reminder will immediately cause any semblance of control or sanity we had to fly out the window. For Margaret (Rebecca Hall), that trauma takes the form of a person: David (Tim Roth). When she glimpses him from across the room during a […]

Review: “Nope”

I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle. Writer and director Jordan Peele opens his third feature film, “Nope,” with that verse from the Bible’s Book of Nahum, effectively laying out the movie we are about to see. For spectacle is what “Nope” is all about, although not […]

Review: “Alone Together”

We’re over two years into this thing now, and I think I’ve figured out at least partially why no movie that centers around the COVID-19 pandemic has been good. In fact, they’ve almost all been almost excruciatingly bad, with the exception of Steven Soderbergh’s straight-to-HBO Max thriller “Kimi,” which tied the protagonist’s anxiety to the […]

Review: “Skies of Lebanon”

He was an astrophysicist who dreamed of sending the first Lebanese man into space. She was a Swiss artist who moved to Beirut to work as a nanny. For this seemingly unusual pair, it was love at first sight, but even the most idyllic romance struggles to withstand the hardships of war. Director and cowriter […]

Review: “Thor: Love and Thunder”

With 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok,” director Taika Waititi injected new life into what had otherwise become the dullest standalone character series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He made it more colorful, brought a wacky sense of humor to the proceedings, surrounded the lead characters with delightfully weird supporting players, and allowed star Chris Hemsworth to cultivate […]

Review: “Elvis”

With a drawn-out, deep howl and a vibration that starts at the toes and rolls up through his entire body, a pivotal scene early in director Baz Luhrmann’s newest movie lets us watch two stars being born. The first is Elvis Presley, the subject of Luhrmann’s biopic “Elvis.” Luhrmann gives us a glimpse of an […]

Review: “Lightyear”

“Lightyear” is the first movie from Pixar Animation Studios to receive a theatrical release since the March 2020 run of “Onward” was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It isn’t that Pixar hasn’t been churning out hits; films like “Soul,” “Luca,” and “Turning Red” have all been released straight to streaming on Disney Plus, […]

Review: “Neptune Frost”

“Neptune Frost” is the sort of film that needs to be experienced without trying too hard to unravel the intricacies of directors Saul Williams (who also wrote and composed the music for the movie) and Anisia Uzeyman’s complex world-building in their Afrofuturist musical. At the same time, it’s essential to engage with the film with […]

Review: “Jurassic World Dominion”

There is likely no more egregious thing that the “Jurassic World” trilogy, or the “Jurassic Park” series as a whole, has done than reunite the trio of Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum for the first time since Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic, only to have Dern’s Dr. Ellie Sattler state that she reconnected with […]