Before jumping into all my fancy thoughts about Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” which I saw in theaters last month, I just… | Continue reading
After three home runs I expected “Anora,” Sean Baker’s newest movie, to leave the ballpark, especially after it won the… | Continue reading
Demi Moore is fantastic in director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”—I guess? The actor has received tons of accolades for her… | Continue reading
It’s true that as humans we retell the same stories endlessly, but the Walt Disney Corporation has transformed this instinct… | Continue reading
After a pretty rough start to the summer movie season, “Deadpool & Wolverine” rode into theaters to save the box… | Continue reading
You might’ve missed writer-director Francis Galluppi’s debut feature “The Last Stop in Yuma County” when it rolled out direct-to-video not… | Continue reading
The takeaway from the May box office was that it was a disaster. Receipts were down by almost a third… | Continue reading
Like a lot of people, once I saw the trailer for Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” a dystopian thriller set in… | Continue reading
Sometimes the best movie experiences are the ones that you go into with few expectations, or maybe even with a… | Continue reading
As the title suggests, Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” is really the climactic second half of the original book. So… | Continue reading
What should we make of “Wonka,” Paul King’s completely un-asked-for prequel to “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”? For many… | Continue reading
Everyone says it was a good year for the movies, and looking back at what I watched in 2023 it’s… | Continue reading
Before we get too far into the new year, and before I wrap up my favorite movies of 2023, here… | Continue reading
December was crazy as always but still I tried to watch as many movies as I could, especially the critical… | Continue reading
If you’re the kind of person who’s always on the lookout for a new Christmas movie to watch over and… | Continue reading
It’s the most wonderful time of the year—for film nerds. It’s that season when all the awards contenders roll into… | Continue reading
September was a rough month. After a bit of travel, I came down with the latest variant of COVID, and… | Continue reading
Catching up on my movies log from late summer here. At the end of August I went to see “Bottoms,”… | Continue reading
Like many people I joined in on the Barbenheimer fun last month and saw both films—not quite the same day,… | Continue reading
For better or worse, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” which I got to see at the theater last month, conforms neatly… | Continue reading
Here we are on the last day of June and I’m only now squeezing in my roundup of movies I… | Continue reading
Here we are on the last day of June and I’m only now squeezing in my roundup of movies I… | Continue reading
What got me out of the house and into a seat at the theater last month? Illumination Entertainment’s incomprehensibly tolerable… | Continue reading
Last month, despite feeling pretty exhausted by the whole Chad Stahelski/David Leitch/Derek Kolstad creative axis that was launched into prominence… | Continue reading
Mid-winter is usually a pretty rough time for worthwhile new movies, but all the same I’m surprised that I actually watched zero of them last month. The reason probably is that I had expended so mu… | Continue reading
After seeing as many of the year-end prestige movies from 2022 as I could in January, I came to the conclusion that overall it was a pretty disappointing slate. Few of the movies I saw, even among … | Continue reading
There’s never enough time to see all of the movies in the conversation for “best of the year,” much less to summarize thoughts on the previous twelve months of new releases. But here, finally in Fe… | Continue reading
We made it! This is my December roundup, the last of about two weeks of posting generally very tardy recaps of the movies I watched in each month of 2022. Whew. It feels good to be finally caught u… | Continue reading
I saw director Rian Johnson’s 2019 parlor room whodunit “Knives Out” in theaters in its original run and liked it so much that I watched it four subsequent times (it’s lost none of its … | Continue reading
There was probably no other film in 2022 that I was looking forward to as much as Park Chan-wook’s “Decision to Leave.” I’m a huge fan of the director’s previous work; his 2006 revenge … | Continue reading
Back in 2014 I was as excited as anyone by the energy, invention and polish of “John Wick,” directed by former stunt coordinators Chad Stahelski and David Leitch. It was an unexpectedly… | Continue reading
Happy new year. If you’re just tuning in, I’m catching up on my monthly movie roundups for 2022. This post covers August but you can also see what I previously watched in July, in June, in May, in … | Continue reading
Back in July, deep in the middle of my summer break, I went to see “After Yang,” the second feature film from YouTube video essayist-turned-film director Kogonada. This artful, incredib… | Continue reading
Now is not the time to explain why I avoid documentaries as a rule, but I did make one exception back in June when a good friend had an extra ticket to see “Turn Every Page–The Adventures of … | Continue reading
Back in May, the only movie that mattered was Joseph Kosinski’s wildly retrograde, politically dim, conservative fantasia “Top Gun: Maverick,” in which defiantly ageless madman Tom Crui… | Continue reading
For a few months earlier this year, everyone everywhere all at once was talking about “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a break out sci-fi adventure film from the directing duo Daniels. I found … | Continue reading
As I’m writing these long-delayed roundups of my monthly movie consumption from earlier this year, I’m finding that the movies I want to talk about most are the smaller scale productions that went … | Continue reading
Continuing my catch-up of the past year of movie posts, here’s my roundup of the twenty-seven movies I watched in February. Mid-winter is the worst time for movies in general, and this slate reflec… | Continue reading
Following my much-delayed recap of the movies I watched in 2021, here’s a roundup of January of this year. February will follow in a day or two, then March, etc., until I’m all caught up. Looking b… | Continue reading
Twenty twenty-one? Surely that’s a mistake, right? No, it’s not, and don’t call me Shirley. Despite the calendar already closing in on 2023, I’m here today to make up for lost time. That is, I’m fi… | Continue reading
December and January are the best time of year for movie lovers. There’s so much to see. Not all of it is great of course, but this year one of my favorites was “The Hand of God,” direc… | Continue reading
November was a bit of a slow month for movie watching. The only new release I saw was director Jeymes Samuels’s “The Harder They Fall,” a Black western that had everything going for it … | Continue reading
In October I went out to see the new James Bond film “No Time to Die,” Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel … | Continue reading
When I decided last month to go back to the theater for only the second time since the pandemic began (and the first time since May), the two top contenders for my box office dollars were Marvel’s … | Continue reading
When I decided last month to go back to the theater for only the second time since the pandemic began (and the first time since May), the two top contenders for my box office dollars were Marvel’s … | Continue reading
Barring another unfortunate left turn in our tortured collective recovery from COVID-19, we’re getting tantalizingly close to seeing the release of a few of the most highly anticipated movies that … | Continue reading
Barring another unfortunate left turn in our tortured collective recovery from COVID-19, we’re getting tantalizingly close to seeing the release of a few of the most highly anticipated movies that … | Continue reading
It’s been two months since I went back to a movie theater for the first time since the pandemic started, but thanks to the Delta variant I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it again since. Th… | Continue reading