Review: “She Is Love”

It’s a classic romantic comedy set-up: after years apart, exes catch a glimpse of each other through a doorway. The catch? One of them runs a boutique hotel in the countryside, and the other is an unsuspecting guest. But in writer/director Jamie Adams’ She Is Love, there’s nothing cute about this awkward meeting, and the […]

Review: “Infinity Pool”

We’re all guilty of indulging in a little self-destructive behavior every once in a while. But while for me the extent of that may be shoveling an entire pizza in my face in one sitting, for James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård), it’s the idea of what he can get away with by throwing some money around […]

Review: “When You Finish Saving the World”

Evelyn Katz (Julianne Moore) is, by textbook definition, a good person; she’s devoted her life to running a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. Her teenage son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) might on the surface be considered the exact opposite. He’s a musician penning tunes he refers to as “classic folk rock with an alternative influence” […]

Review: “Missing”

In 2018, Aneesh Chaganty presented a unique twist on an otherwise run-of-the-mill thriller with his directorial debut, “Searching.” A father’s (played by John Cho) desperate quest to find his missing daughter is depicted entirely through his computer screen: video calls, text messages, web searches, and phone calls. I remember enjoying “Searching” quite a bit when […]

Review: “Alice, Darling”

It’s all in the details. Tugging out her hair. Leaping to answer her phone every time it dings. The constant calorie-counting. Always needing to have her hair and make-up done just right. When we first meet Alice (Anna Kendrick), she’s meeting her two best friends Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn) for dinner, but […]

Review: “The Old Way”

There’s a moment in the climax of director Brett Donowho’s “The Old Way” where baddie James McCallister (Noah Le Gros) and gunslinger Colton Briggs (Nicolas Cage) finally confront each other face-to-face after having spent the entire movie on each other’s heels. McCallister tells Briggs that they’re going to resolve this conflict “the old way”—i.e., with […]

Favorite Discoveries of 2022

If you don’t follow me on any other platform outside of this blog, you might not realize how many movies I watch each year outside of new releases—so many, in fact, that I wonder why I bother subscribing to any other streaming service when I increasingly spend the bulk of my time inside of the […]

Review: “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody”

Whitney Houston was the greatest voice of her generation, though you might not know it from the biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” the very title of which feels the need to explain a subject who needs no introduction. Her vocal prowess is never in question, but the film treads so lightly over […]

Best Movies of 2022

2021 may have been the year we went back to the movies, but 2022 felt more like the year that movies were back. “Spectacle” seems to be the theme running concurrently through so many of this year’s releases. We got sprawling epics with meaty runtimes, starry casts, and vast set-pieces that demanded to be seen […]

Review: “Babylon”

“White elephants—the God of Hollywood wanted white elephants, and white elephants he got—eight of ‘em, plaster mammoths perched on mega-mushroom pedestals, lording it over the colossal court of Belshazzar, the pasteboard Babylon built beside the dusty tin-lizzie trail called Sunset Boulevard. …Belshazzar’s Feast beneath Egyptian blue skies, spread out under the blazing Southern California morning […]