Search for 2019

Despite being blessed with well-designed period sets and top-tier acting, this collaboration between Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes and director Michael Engler fails to take flight. I’m not one who normally issues demerits for a slow p...

It’s refreshing to find a teen romance that doesn’t feel obligated to end with a confession of undying affection. In real life, which Chemical Hearts seeks to emulate, high school love affairs may result in fumbling in the dark, loss of vi...

It’s easy to envision how the 2019 re-imagination of Child’s Play could have been successful. After all, the original wasn’t that great of a movie to begin with, born as it was in the cauldron of late 1980s slasher garbage. There was ple...

The movie starts out with a degree of promise. A young woman, suffering through the aftermath of a traumatic breakup, travels to her former lover’s lake house, breaks in, and sets up home. Everything about it – the cinematography, the pace...

Close feels like many of the numerous direct-to-DVD titles that were prevalent during the 2000s. High on action and low on logic, those movies were made quickly and for little money to satisfy an audience whose expectations were for 90 minutes...

Those going to Cold Pursuit expecting a typical early-year Liam Neeson action thriller may be disconcerted by what Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland delivers. On the surface, this is a standard-order revenge movie: a snow-plow driver, Nels...

Crawl is an old-fashioned B-grade monster movie made with 2019 technology. In short, that means plenty of gore and jump-scares to go along with creatures that no longer look like puppets or men in rubber suits. Jaws kept the shark hidden for m...

There was a time when James Wan’s association with a film meant something. Wan built his horror credibility with the likes of Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring. The last of those gave birth to a brand name (dubbed “the Conjuring universe�...

For longtime fans of the X-Men comic books, “The Dark Phoenix Saga” has been the Holy Grail. As crafted by Chris Claremont and John Byrne (with an assist from Dave Cockrum), the epic narrative, which was a major element of The Uncanny X-Me...

In the terrorist-busting business, perception is more important than reality. That’s the thesis of Christopher Morris’ blistering black comedy, The Day Shall Come, and he delivers the message with the subtlety of a jackhammer. The most dis...