Review: “Mickey 17”

In Martin Ritt’s 1979 film Norma Rae, Sally Field’s titular character is spurred to unionize the cotton mill where she works after hearing a speech by Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Leibman), a union organizer from New York City who states that, “your average working man is not stupid. He just gets tired.” In Bong Joon-ho’s earnest […]

Review: “Rats!”

Rats! is very much a your-milage-will-vary sort of movie. Writers, directors, and producers Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry’s debut feature film’s blend of satire, gross-out comedy, and social commentary drew comparisons to the filmography of John Waters following its award-winning world premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2024, a comparison that turns out to be an […]

Review: “Paddington in Peru”

I do wonder how I might have received Paddington in Peru had I not had such an immediately ardent reaction to the two preceding films in the series. I’m not exaggerating when I say that 2014’s Paddington and 2017’s Paddington 2 are masterpieces of family entertainment that I’ve rewatched ad nauseam in the years since […]

Review: “Heart Eyes”

For a while, Heart Eyes is about as stuck on what it wants to say about love as those guys on Hinge who only seem interested in talking about beer, that one trip they took abroad five years ago, and The Office. Bearing the tagline “Romance is dead,” director Josh Ruben’s slasher/rom-com mash-up opens with […]

Review: “Grand Theft Hamlet”

To game, perchance to dream. During the United Kingdom’s third COVID-19 related lockdown in 2021, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen— London-based actors unable to find work while their industry remained at a standstill— found a way to merge two seemingly disparate interests: Shakespeare, and Grand Theft Auto. The latter— an online open world video game […]

Review: “Presence”

Director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp understand that there are infinitely more frightening things in the world than paranormal entities. That becomes increasingly evident throughout Presence, the duo’s second collaboration following their crackerjack 2022 thriller Kimi. Perhaps it’s rooted in the fact that they were each somewhat inspired by their personal close brushes with […]

Review: “Wolf Man”

The opening of Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man isn’t supremely tense or novel, but it is, at least, promising. Grady Lovell (Sam Jaeger) is hunting with his young son Blake (Zac Chandler) in the forest surrounding their remote Oregon home. The prologue’s doom-laden text, detailing rumors surrounding a missing hiker in the area and a possible […]

Review: “The Last Showgirl”

About midway through The Last Showgirl, we see Pamela Anderson’s Shelly Gardner curled up in the living room of her Las Vegas home, watching a movie. The two shots we briefly see flash across the screen— first of woman clad in a long gown hoisting a glittering hoop, a bevy of chorus girls lying at […]

Review: “A Complete Unknown”

You can’t fully know Bob Dylan. Thats’s something that Todd Haynes understood when he made I’m Not There, his radical 2007 biopic that crafts an image of the legendarily enigmatic musician’s life in fragments portrayed by six different actors, ranging from a young Black boy to Cate Blanchett. Perhaps that’s also something that director James […]

Review: “Nocturnes”

You likely won’t walk out of Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes with a lot of newfound facts and figures about moths knocking about in your brain. What their film accomplishes, however, is much more impressive than many nature documentaries: an inherent love for and understanding of the need to protect these creatures, achieved not […]