Search for 2017

Despite embracing the tropes one associates with the Western, Michael Matthews’ Five Fingers of Marseilles transpires in an atypical locale: post-Colonial South Africa. Matthews reaffirms what Sergio Leone identified – the Western doesn’...

The original Flatliners, the 1990 psychological horror film directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland, wasn’t a good movie. Despite some nice performances, it took a promising premise and squandered the pot...

Despite a seemingly straightforward slice-of-life storyline, The Florida Project achieves something rare and magical: presenting existence from the perspective of a young child while, at the same time, providing enough “clues” that viewers...

For Jackie Chan, The Foreigner represents a change of pace. Best-known for light-hearted action/comedies, Chan has never before descended to the level of darkness required by this film. In this thriller, directed by James Bond filmmaker Marti...

Get Out is a horror film but it’s not like any horror film that has reached theaters in a long time. To begin with, it’s rated R, and the R-rated horror film has become something of an endangered species in this era of PG-13’ing everything. The...

Ghost House is a generally well-made but ultimately unsurprising excursion into the supernatural. Although more interested in psychological terror than a high body count, the film touches enough of the expected tropes that horror fans will be ...

As a noisy, CGI-saturated spectacle, there’s no arguing that Ghost in the Shell gets the job done. Every cent spent on the movie appears to have made it into the final cut – an indication that the actors probably did most of their work in ...

Here’s a piece of advice: don’t watch a trailer for Gifted prior to seeing the film. This warning has nothing to do with spoilers; the trailer makes the movie seem like a cloying, paint-by-numbers story that no one in their right mind would...

Girls Trip is the fusion of a raunchy vacation comedy and a female-bonding melodrama. Unfortunately, the jokes stop being funny about 30 minutes before the end credits roll and the character-based elements are never better than overly familia...

The Glass Castle, based on the memoir of the same name by Jeannette Walls, comes across as an offbeat coming-of-age story whose integrity is impeded by the need for closure. Real life doesn’t work that way but movie-goers don’t like loose ...