Review: “The French Dispatch”

Perhaps I’m showing my personal bias for Wes Anderson’s work— his use of color, meticulously detailed sets, and symmetrical framing has always appealed to me— when I say that I loved “The French Dispatch” from the moment it began. A pair of hands efficiently fill a tray with all manner of beverages, before we see […]

Review: “Last Night in Soho”

The sparkling lights of a theatre marquee; the swishy minidresses and dapper suits swirling across the dance floor; classy cocktails and a singer crooning—if that all sounds like something out of a dream, that’s because it is. Eloise Turner’s dream, to be exact. Eloise, who goes by Ellie, and is played by the always great […]

Streaming Movie Reviews

It’s been a while since I’ve shared some capsule reviews, but October, as promised, has been a stacked month for movies. Today I’m catching up with five direct-to-streaming releases, including a couple picks for Halloween (Disney Channel’s “Under Wraps” remake and Netflix’s slasher “There’s Someone Inside Your House”), the thrillers “The Voyeurs” and “The Guilty,” […]

Review: “Dune” (2021)

For decades, Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel “Dune” has been considered unfilmable. Perhaps that’s true; perhaps that notion is just the result of many years of productions that failed to get off the ground, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed 14 hour long adaptation, or ones that just straight up failed, like David Lynch’s 1984 movie. With […]

Review: “Halloween Kills”

If 2018’s “Halloween”— the first installment in a new trilogy that continues the events of the classic 1978 slasher— was about Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her family facing the pain of the past, its sequel, “Halloween Kills,” is about how weaponizing that pain can turn us as evil as the entity we are […]

Review: “The Last Duel”

The myth of noble knights, regal ladies, and majestic, sprawling kingdoms is one that is often romanticized, both in fantasy and in stories based in reality. So far this year, we’ve already had one film, David Lowery’s “The Green Knight”— an adaptation of an Arthurian legend— challenge the notion of the courageous knight on a […]

Review: “The Rescue”

In 2018, the world was held rapt by the story of 12 young soccer players and their coach, who became trapped deep in a cave in Thailand, flooded by monsoon rains. But the enthralling discovery by divers that all 13 individuals were still alive deep underground 10 days after their disappearance comes less than halfway […]

Review: “The Addams Family 2”

2019’s animated “The Addams Family” movie was a disappointment largely in how it shoehorned its unconventional characters into such a conventional plot, but at least it showcased the weirdness of each character and the spooky mansion they live in. Not even that can be said for its new sequel, “The Addams Family 2,” which sees […]

Review: “Bergman Island”

“Bergman Island” is one of those movies that I had to watch twice before I could really start to grasp its intricacies. There’s no doubt that writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve’s movie has a lot for film fans to chew on. Set on Fårö, the Swedish island where the legendary director Ingmar Bergman lived, worked, and was […]

Review: “No Time to Die”

Six actors (seven, if you’d like to throw David Niven in there for the 1967 parody “Casino Royale”) have portrayed Agent 007 in the nearly 60 years since a tuxedo-clad Sean Connery first introduced himself as “Bond, James Bond” in 1962’s “Dr. No.” They’ve all come and gone over the years without a lot of […]