The release of Avengers:Infinity War last year felt like the grand payoff of our decade-long investment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Twenty years ago, most of the public hadn’t even heard of many of these heroes, but their erasure from existence by the snap of Thanos’ finger and our resulting shock showed how entrenched they’d […]
Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace, released in 1972, remains to this day the highest-selling live gospel album of all time, a stunning display of raw talent, passion, and emotion. Regardless of your beliefs, or lack of them, you can’t help but have a near religious experience while listening to Franklin’s interpretation of gospel classics “Mary Don’t […]
Many times, a film based on true events will inspire you to seek out the source material once it’s over. Not necessarily to test the movie for accuracy—facts are sometimes changed for clarity or artistic license—but as a way of further engaging with a story. Even a film à clef based on actual events but […]
The hollow shell where human joy ought to be is a fantastically creepy thing. It’s what Tim Burton spent his early years satirizing—the self-satisfied stability (read: stagnation) of suburbia through the eyes of an outsider who finds no satisfaction in it. The smiling husks felt like prison [...]
With Get Out, Jordan Peele electrified the world of modern horror filmmaking, reinvigorating the potential for strong socio-political messages in harrowing and entertaining packages. The message amplified the scares and vice versa, sending shockwaves all the way to the Academy Awards. With Us, [...]
As Disney finds the next title from its vault to adapt, Border explores what it means to truly update a fairy tale for modern audiences. What is a fairy tale, after all, but a story that explores the space where our world and the realm of spirits, demons, monsters, and other mythological beings [...]
Films by or about women don’t need to be masterpieces in order to have the right to exist. It’s a point that should be obvious by now, but sadly needs to be made every single time some group with nothing better to do decides that X movie is the next battleground because God forbid a […]
When the great classics of world literature were first being written, they were not meant for students or academics decades or centuries in the future. First and foremost, they were meant to foster a relationship between reader and writer. For Andrew Kaufman, who teaches Russian literature at [...]
If Peter Berg was more interested in emulating Michael Mann than Michael Bay, Mile 22 might be something. An international thriller based around getting a high-value asset from point A to point B through extremely hostile territory within a very narrow window should be exciting from beginning [...]
Ari Aster’s Hereditary may be the best, scariest, and most effective American horror film in years. Not because it has the loudest scares, not because its ghosts have the creepiest faces, and not because its deaths are the most gruesome (though it does have its share). Writer-director Aster’s [...]
The will to survive is the single most primal instinct in our nature, one that strips away all of the things we use to define ourselves as individuals. Adrift, based on a true story, follows Tami (Shailene Woodley) and Richard (Sam Claflin) on their struggle to find either land or rescue as [...]
With Deadpool 2, the deconstruction becomes the norm. That’s not necessarily a bad thing given how bloated and redundant the X-Men franchise has become, and how terrifically its predecessor broke every taboo while delivering a solid film with a real story of its own. But how do you skewer [...]
Credit is due to Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy for their efforts to inject meaningful emotions into broad comedies without punching down or relying on unwarranted meanness for their punchlines. But it would help if those punchlines were funny. Back in 2013, their collaboration on Tammy used [...]
Cutting right to the chase, Avengers: Infinity War is pretty damn good and may even be unpredictable for the Easter egg-hunting, online theory crowd —but how the hell do you even begin to describe a movie like this? Installment to installment, the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies work more or [...]
Though Broken Lizard found mixed critical and financial results with its subsequent follow-ups to the 2001 cult hit Super Troopers, you do have to hand it to the guys for wanting to try something different before coming back around to the property that launched their film and TV careers. The [...]
There’s really only one way to sell the story of a Special Forces veteran and anti-poaching commando turned conservationist who’s helping his overgrown gorilla friend overcome anger issues to stop a flying porcupine-wolf and a crocodile-leviathan from destroying Chicago: completely [...]
A dialogue of national reconciliation takes the form of a courtroom drama in Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult, one of this year’s nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. It all begins as a minor conflict between a Lebanese Christian mechanic, Tony (Adel Karam), and a Palestinian engineer living in [...]
Before we get into just how much Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One misses the mark, it’s worth noting that its badness has nothing to do with video games and the people who enjoy them. Critics often come down harder on movies about subcultures they disapprove of or simply haven’t taken the [...]
You have to respect when a director clearly loves the material and subject of his movie, and when a performer is perfectly cast and goes the extra mile to give the character extra weight. You just don’t have to like it. So it goes with Tomb Raider and critic favorite Alicia Vikander, who is [...]
In Red Sparrow, a fallen Russian ballerina (Jennifer Lawrence) is given an impossible choice—to sacrifice her free will and dignity for her country by becoming a “sparrow” trained in the art of exploiting the sexual vulnerabilities of her targets, or lose the apartment and medical coverage [...]
Game Night is a funny, exciting thriller-comedy with fun performances and a story that keeps you guessing. Who in the world saw this coming? Certainly not whoever edited the trailer, which sold it as another underwritten yarn with an on-the-nose title about insufferable schmucks who get in over [...]
War has been a part of the human experience for all of recorded history. But what happens when the things that drive us to it are no longer a factor? Resources, borders, languages, religions; if we found ourselves in a situation where none of those things truly mattered, would we still find [...]
The world of Paul Thomas Anderson is one in which the mundane, everyday lives of its characters are already riveting before something positively insane happens. Look at his most recent films—had There Will Be Blood only been about the hunt for oil against a beautifully bleak landscape, you [...]