Review: “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire”

The self-seriousness of the nostalgia-bait Ghostbusters sequel to open with Robert Frost’s poem Fire and Ice is almost laughable. And yet, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire— the fifth Ghostbusters movie and a direct sequel to 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife— plays its ridiculous premise fairly straight. That fan service would abound in a movie that throws new characters alongside […]

Review: “Riddle of Fire”

“It’s like a modern-day Goonies” has turned into a catch-all phrase covering any sort of adventure story centered on children, particularly ones that are steeped in nostalgia (perhaps the most recognizable example is the Netflix series Stranger Things, which begins in the early 1980s a mere couple of years before Richard Donner’s The Goonies was […]

Review: “Love Lies Bleeding”

As soon as reclusive Lou (Kristen Stewart) glimpses statuesque body builder Jackie (Katy O’Brien) from across the gym she manages, we know she’s sunk. The way director Rose Glass allows the camera to absorb this expression of desire, and the sensuous way she lingers on the body, tracing every line of Jackie’s muscular frame, are […]

Review: “The Taste of Things”

If cooking is one of the most romantic things you can do for another person, then surely Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things is the most sumptuous instance of that action being committed to film. Immediately, Hùng immerses the viewer in the act, not just the preparing and serving of food, but taking us […]

Review: “Argylle”

“This was our song,” a man murmurs to a woman as they tenderly sway to the music across the dance floor. The song in question is “Now and Then,” a “new” song by the “Beatles” that was released in November 2023— nearly two years after principal photography wrapped on Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle. The song, in […]

Review: “The Zone of Interest”

The following review contains some spoilers for the ending of The Zone of Interest. Any time a filmmaker holds on a shot for a length of time, the audience becomes aware of their role as voyeurs. We’re yanked out of the most likely reason why we’re watching the movie in the first place— to escape, […]

Review: “Bye Bye Tiberias”

Hiam Abbass craved escape. At least, that’s what she remembers. As she rifles through a stack of letters she wrote to her parents shortly after her mother’s passing, she is specifically searching for the one she penned to explain to them why she left home, because she can’t quite recall what she said in it. […]

Review: “Origin”

Origin is about as ambitious an adaptation imaginable. It’s a fitting project for director Ava DuVernay, who—whether working in narrative features or documentaries or television— has always swung for the fences. Her film is based on journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which posits that racism in the United […]

Review: “Mean Girls” (2024)

One afternoon in the middle of December 2018, I hoofed it a good eight blocks across the packed streets of Manhattan as tourists crowded around Rockefeller Center and the department store shop windows to catch a glimpse of the city’s elaborate Christmas decorations to the August Wilson Theatre to watch Mean Girls— not the 2004 […]

Home Video Review: “Fremont”

“Now is a good time to explore.” As the camera moves about the interior of a fortune cookie factory, meditatively observing the employees at work, perfectly in tune to the rhythms of the machinery and the sounds (that obnoxiously noisy crinkle of wrappers), it lands on a small slip of paper with that statement printed […]