Movie Reviews, Old and New
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 […]
Read More Review: “Halloween Kills”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 […]
Read More Review: “The Last Duel”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 […]
Read More Review: “The Rescue”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 […]
Read More Review: “The Addams Family 2”“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 […]
Read More Review: “Bergman Island”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 […]
Read More Review: “No Time to Die”I’ll be the first to admit that I— along with many others— entered 2018’s “Venom” with the wrong expectations (you can read my lukewarm review from its initial release here). I distinctly remember sitting in the theater, not quite able to believe what I was watching. A gritty, serious comic book movie, “Venom” is not. […]
Read More Review: ”Venom: Let There Be Carnage”“Titane” may have only just been released in theaters stateside, but writer/director Julia Ducournau’s second feature, which recently won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is already notorious for its main character’s, um, affinity for automobiles. But there is way more to “Titane” than that. It’s a horror film, sure, one that involves pregnancy and self-mutilation […]
Read More Review: “Titane”Today from the Nashville Film Festival, I’m covering two films that are playing as part of the festival’s Graveyard Shift Films program, and horror fans in particular will want to seek them out. Jim Cummings’ “The Beta Test,” which he directed, wrote, and starred in along with PJ McCabe, is a thrilling and funny skewering […]
Read More Nashville Film Festival Reviews: “The Beta Test,” “The Murder Podcast”Few filmmakers lately seem as capable of accomplishing as much in two hours as Nana Mensah does in 75 minutes in her directorial debut, “Queen of Glory.” Mensah wrote the film as well as stars as Sarah, a Ghanaian-American living in New York City whose life is turned upside down after the sudden death of […]
Read More Nashville Film Festival Review: “Queen of Glory”