When you’re a struggling writer, you’ll take any employment opportunities. So it is with Verity protagonist, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a novelist whose works languish in obscurity. That’s why,…

If you are Gen X or a Millennial, chances are good you’ve encountered some piece of “Kill Barney” “humor” over the years. Perhaps a quick-and-dirty reworking of “I Love You” or something even more…

In perfect fashion for its collection of castoffs, Slow Horses Season 6 begins with a payroll error. For some reason, no one at Slough House got a paycheck. By the end of the season, bodies,…

If you’ve never played a horror video game, you probably haven’t really considered just how much scarier they can be than a horror movie. The difference is in the control. In a game, you’re not…

Whether fairly or not, the ending of a work can determine one’s impression of it. A film or TV show that ends badly can leave even everything that preceded it looking worse. That’s not quite the…

In the world of high-sheen, surface-level studio horror franchises, Insidious is relatively solid. It follows the expected pattern. The first, released in 2010, now ranks as something of a modern…

It’s strange how big a difference a shift in perspective can make. For over a decade, the Jurassic World franchise has repeatedly told its characters—and filmgoing audiences—that dinosaurs are passé.…

One of the delights of Reacher's first two seasons was seeing this enormous man be the best. He was consistently be the smartest, strongest, and most dryly sarcastic cat in any room. The creative…

There’s an adage that goes, “People are rarely not weird about sex.” Don’t worry about looking it up. Just trust us on this one. One Night Only and the reactions it’s inspired have clearly…

Thanks to the wild success of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie earlier this year, audiences should be a little less surprised by Matt Johnson’s slippery relationship to reality, rules, and…

Bret Easton Ellis has a distinct style. That’s always been a part of his appeal. You can hear a passage from Less Than Zero, American Psycho, or Lunar Park and recognize the same pen behind them even…

I love Ted Lasso. Yes, even the overstuffed and hurried third season, which, in retrospect, left several subplots stranded or too swiftly wrapped. So, while the show did find a satisfying ending, I…

Adaptation is a tricky thing. One need only look at the current controversy around The Odyssey to see that. Homer and Emily Wilson occupy decidedly different literary spaces than Stan Lee, Steve…

Creating a near-wordless film in the modern era is a challenging exercise. Sometimes it utterly implodes, as with John Woo’s 2023 Silent Night, my pick for worst film of that year. When done…

In a review written exactly two years to the day I’m writing this one, I complained that Batman: Caped Crusader did too little to differentiate itself from Batman: The Animated Series. My argument,…

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been on a tear in recent years. Since 2020, he’s had eight projects. That includes two features and a short film in 2024 alone—Cloud, a thriller about an internet reseller;…

In Spinal Tap, there’s a moment where Marty Di Bergi (Rob Reiner) shares some album reviews with the band. One in particular, Shark Sandwich, earns the two-word critique, “Shit Sandwich.” Some titles…

What if one were to make “Parental Issues: The Series” and mix in a crime drama for fun? It would likely look a lot like Lucky, the thin but enjoyable Jonathan Tropper-helmed adaptation of Marissa…

Four years after Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde’s previous directorial effort, it can be tempting to view The Invite as some sort of comeback effort. It was certainly a film met with its share of…

“When you turn on the light/It’s just an apparition/Now I believe in ghosts.” Kacey Musgraves crooned those words on the Middle of Nowhere track “I Believe in Ghosts.” Many viewers of The Last…

Squish! Squelch! “EEEEEEEEEE!” These are the noises dominating the soundscape of Evil Dead Burn, overcoming even Double Danger’s original score. Would you expect anything less from the newest entry…

For those intrigued by AppleTV’s adaptation of Hugh Howey’s novel series but find its deliberate pacing and hushed tones too off-putting, I have potentially good news. In Silo Season 3, the…

Celebrity “free passes” are one of those relationship games that no one ever really expects to play out. For one, the chance of ever randomly encountering Harry Styles or Margaret Qualley at their…

Screenwriters Brian Lynch and Pierre Coffin (also the director) begin Minions & Monsters with a frightening phrase: “tribes of Minions exist across the globe”. As spoken by Olivia (Allison Janney),…

In the near future, Texas will open up America’s first “detransition clinic.” This disturbing domicile pushing a bogus “cure” for trans identity—a state of being that requires no cure, to be clear—is…

Hollywood will infamously adapt anything into a movie. Yet, outside of the Christian movie scene (where I Can Only Imagine and God’s Not Dead reign supreme), motion pictures based on chart-topping…

While “women’s pictures” had an initial heyday in the 50s, they experienced an overheated renaissance in the 90s on channels like Lifetime. In this new era, the over-the-top nature of classics like…

Private Investigator John Sugar (Colin Farrell) is an alien! Phew, feels good to get that off my chest. Over two years ago, when Sugar debuted, it kept the secret of John’s extraterrestrial nature…

Toy Story 5 relates to its predecessor, Toy Story 4, without quite the level of sweaty “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” backpedaling that The Rise of Skywalker had with The Last Jedi. Still, this new…

The Fabelmans saw Spielberg finally address, openly and explicitly, the driving forces of his creative life. That said, it didn’t so much unlock Spielberg’s willingness to get personal in his…

One of the hardest things about making movies about artists is convincingly capturing their work on screen. If you could paint an incredible work of art, chances are you’d do that, not create it for…

“We will never meet because we live in different times. I cannot send you a glacier, but I can send you this,” says narrator and poet Andri Snær Magnason in the opening moments of Time and Water, a…

Laika founder and director Travis Knight first jumped to live-action filmmaking with Bumblebee. There, by letting the franchise’s robots function as sincere dramatic figures, he provided a welcome…

Watching the latest interpretation of an oft-adapted work, there’s a certain temptation to try to get ahead of the story. To identify the familiar beats, to spot the new twists. I've watched the two…

Much like The Great Mouse Detective heralded the imminent arrival of the Disney Renaissance, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink has proven a harbinger of the 2020s horror cinema scene. Specifically, it…

It isn’t hard to find people who complain that “they don’t make movies for adults like they used to”. Regardless of the validity of that declinist point of view, the cinematic varietal that…

One of the harder things to accept as a comic book fan is that your favorite character is going to be different depending on where they show up. Yes, they have some core qualities and a power set…

The classic @Tormny_Pickeals’ tweet declared, “Black Panther was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the Black Panther turned to the camera & said i…

Star Wars and television have been going together like “ramma-lamma-lamma-ka-dingity-da-dinga-dong” for ages. Never forget, the second piece of filmed Star Wars media ever was that Star Wars Holiday…

As a title, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed feels at least oxymoronic if not knowingly ironic. The series does start with a virtual “relationship” between the recently divorced Paula (Tatiana Maslany)…

If you are younger, say under 30, you might know have a great idea who David E. Kelley is or was. But for Gen Xers and geriatric to mid-Millennials who grew up on network television, he looms large. H...

Because everything on the internet inevitably must face the twin reapers of irony poisoning and capitalistic corruption, lifehacks have evolved. They've graduated from at least mildly useful…

Men are terrifying. You need not even gaze on the men in high American political positions to recognize that reality. Just try being a woman taking an Uber ride home on a Saturday night. Or standing…

“When I see a botanical garden, I see a bunch of lonely souls,” says scientist Alice (Léa Seydoux). At first, that’s what Silent Friend seems to show us—a collection of lonely people scattered across…

Not to get all M. Night Shyamalan here, but let’s talk about organizing units in comics. Stick with me, I promise this is going somewhere. The total “world” of Marvel Comics is the Marvel Universe,…

Adapting a play into a feature film is not for the faint of heart. For every Casablanca, The Father, His Girl Friday, or Stalag 17 that yield rich creative rewards, there are a host of failures like…

Taron Egerton playing a weirdo is a gift. But even gifts have their limitations. For Egerton, that limitation appears to be Apex, a survival thriller now on Netflix. Tapping into his oddness can turn…

One glance at the poster for The Sheep Detectives is enough to fill one’s soul with dread. All those celebrities voicing CG sheep? From one of the Minions directors? Surely this project will be to…

As a genre, horror constantly searches for new ways to make the ordinary scary. From the quaint suburbs of Halloween to a bright summer day in Midsommar to the children’s toys of Chucky and The…