Fresh ideas are rare in the horror game, so it’s not surprising that Truth or Dare quickly devolves into a riff on the Final Destination films, which had Death wittily and methodically hunting those it failed to nab in plane crashes and other disasters
… This is a movie where everyone in Johnson’s radius accuses his character of hating humanity, when the actor himself can’t help ingratiating himself to everything …
The film — which is nowhere near as interesting as LaBeouf’s performance — is hopelessly reductive about its subjects’ psychology even as it mocks the press of 1980 for being reductive about its subjects’ psychology
Brad Anderson’s talky-smartish thriller Beirut, like the first half of Million Dollar Arm, sets Hamm’s sharpie loose in a country — in this case a fractious Lebanon — where the rules aren’t his
The mode is comic frustration, the story centered on a reasonable man (played by Armie Hammer) frustrated at the eccentricities of a wild-haired genius (Geoffrey Rush, as the painter Alberto Giacometti)
Working from a novel by Willy Vlautin, Haigh has committed himself to making a boy-and-his-horse movie that’s scraped free of everything false or sentimental about the genre
… What makes O.G. so fresh and appealing is how, while it’s a laugh riot, the characters are both written and portrayed as grounded, fully realized folk
Lost in Space is nearly Steven Spielberg airy, telling the story of a super-smart family selected to populate a Utopian space colony but who get lost somewhere along the way
Though written by two men, Blockers smartly confronts the gendered double standards that have littered the genre for generations, as well as homophobia and other vehicles for predictable jokes
Curran’s film, often enthralling and upsetting, represents a welcome break in the hagiographic treatment the longtime Lion of the Senate enjoyed in the years leading up to his 2009 death
Acrimony establishes that Robert is a cheating, lowdown dog and that Melinda has anger management problems that make the Hulk seem docile
… The ground rules for this desolate new America: Make any sort of sharp, unexpected sound and a mantis-like alien creature will zoom out of nowhere to swoop you away to an instant, grisly death
When the third season begins, in a bit of meta-commentary, the Everlasting producers are scrambling to undo the effects of the bad PR the program endured on its last go-round
The movie follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an orphaned teenager living in Columbus, Ohio, in 2045, who spends pretty much all his time, along with everyone else in this world, inside a virtual universe called The Oasis …
Problems’ main focus is on Johnnie Mae Brown (Vertamae Grosvenor), a nurse who, despite her strong-willed demeanor, is going through the middle-age blues
… This first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzi (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is at times moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia …
… the film is dedicated to “all who have been persecuted for their faith,” which means that in today’s world, it’s pretty much dedicated to everybody
A splendid jewel box of a movie about rather grisly matters, the filmmaker’s latest represents another example of the clash between his playfully self-aware aesthetic and his growing obsession with our inhumanity
Fortunately, Rothstein’s film, for the most part, is more well-reported expose than it is cliche-driven agitprop, a film that blows the whistle on ongoing financial crimes
This Terror, developed by David Kajganich and certainly the best of AMC’s prestige-TV horror series, is always suspenseful, superbly acted, shrewdly paced and committed to the summoning up what the experience of Arctic isolation might actually have been like
Besides telling the story of two rappers who eventually became casualties in the ‘90s ridiculous East Coast/West Coast rap beef, Unsolved is also a double-stacked, occasionally trite, police procedural
“The robots were the good guys, because humans drove them. So maybe they weren’t technically robots. Well, some of them were.”
