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: “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain”

Director Morgan Neville has helmed some of the best documentaries in recent memory. Watching his 2018 film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”—about children’s television personality Fred Rogers—was one of the most memorable experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater. With his new film, Neville profiles the life and career of another TV icon: celebrity […]

Review: “The Green Knight”

My opening night screening of “The Green Knight” was an uncharacteristically crowded one for these pandemic times, and as I stood outside the theater for a few minutes afterward, listening to other audience members react to what we had just seen, I realized that it sounded like almost everyone had a similar response: that they […]

Review: “Snake Eyes”

Do you remember the “G.I. Joe” movies? I say movies, plural, because there were two of them—2009’s “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and 2013’s “G.I. Joe: Retaliation“—although it has been so long since the films based on the line of Hasbro toys was released that I can’t imagine anyone but the most diehard fans […]

Review: “Old”

We all reckon with our mortality at some point—probably more often than is healthy, if we’re being honest. We spend so much time dwelling on where we’ll be in one year, five years, ten years, twenty. And age may just be a number, but the anxiety of that number changing is still ever-present. In his […]

Review: “Settlers”

The western and science fiction genres share several similar themes, particularly when the subject of the latter is exploration into the unknown, essentially transporting the frontier from the American West to the edges of outer space. It can be exciting and fascinating and introspective when done right. Unfortunately, writer and director Wyatt Rockefeller’s film “Settlers” […]

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 […]