Search for 2019

With the freedom offered to him by Netflix, Martin Scorsese has crafted a narratively complex, visually arresting account of mob hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) and, in the process, reunited with some old friends and brought new ones to ...

It is sometimes said that there’s no such thing as “too much of a good thing.” In the case of Stephen King’s It, that may not be true. Clocking in at a bloated 170 minutes, It Chapter Two is a full 35 minutes longer than Chapter One an...

The John Wick series, now on cruise control for its third installment, has fallen into a trap. The filmmakers have become so intent on delivering “more of the same” that they have lost all sense of proportion. While hyper-violent, quasi-co...

It’s not hard to understand how something like Jojo Rabbit might divide audiences. Comedies about Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Third Reich can be difficult to sell, even if there’s an underlying seriousness to the subject matter. Writer/...

In the Batman universe, there are two kinds of darkness: the surface-deep emptiness of the Zack Snyder approach and Christopher Nolan’s baked-into-the-DNA aesthetic. For the stand-alone Joker, which is said to be neither prequel nor the star...

JT LeRoy, Justin Kelly’s adaptation of Savannah Knoop’s memoir, strives to be more than a run-of-the-mill biopic about two women who perpetrate a con on the literary world. It wants to address issues of gender fluidity and hypocrisy. It wa...

When today’s average movie-goer thinks of Judy Garland, the image that comes to mind is that of Dorothy Gale, the girl-next-door heroine of The Wizard of Oz. Few remember the Garland of the 1960s – a pill-popping alcoholic with a self-dest...

Perhaps there are interesting directions in which the filmmakers could have taken the Jumanji series – after all, the 2017 reboot, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, was vast improvement over the mid-1990s original. Unfortunately, driven by Hol...

Just Mercy is the kind of high-minded tale about social injustice that often opens around this time of the year. Despite the whiff of “Oscar bait” surrounding the production, it’s a well-made, affecting tale about do-gooders who do good ...

Regardless of the genre, there’s an art to making a successful family feature. It involves crafting a storyline that’s straightforward enough to engage younger viewers yet sufficiently sophisticated that it keeps the attention of the paren...