Search for 2020

The Vast of Night begins with an image of a TV set. A show is just beginning as the camera moves in, allowing all other details but the grainy black-and-white image to fade away. A voice, sounding suspiciously like Rod Serling, tells us “You...

Vivarium could have been written by Steven King, but it wasn’t. It could be an episode of The Twilight Zone, but it’s not. The movie, whose story/screenplay is co-credited to director Lorcan Finnegan and Garret Shanley, is a study in the p...

There are countless ways a motion picture can address themes of loss and grief. While one can at least give Tara Miele’s Wander Darkly props for trying something different, the film’s success is questionable at best. In trying to blend a T...

Robert De Niro has made his share of nearly-unwatchable comedies so, although it’s tempting to say The War with Grandpa is the worst, I can’t say that definitively. It is, however, bad enough to deserve consideration for that dubious disti...

The Way Back conflates a sports movie with the tale of an alcoholic struggling to overcome his addiction. It plays out a little like a cross between Hoosiers and Manchester by the Sea. Although director Gavin O’Connor and writer Brad Ingelsb...

In some ways, the 1980s represent the perfect era in which to set a slasher – recent enough for the societal norms to be recognizable but prior to the advent of such plot twist-busting devices like the cellphone and the Internet. Mark Meyers...

Once upon a time, Robert Zemeckis was a visionary filmmaker. His early resume reads like a list of well-remembered classics: Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, The Polar Express… But Zemeckis has fallen on hard times a...

The ability of superhero movies to maintain momentum from installment-to-installment has proven over the years to be difficult, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the sequel to 2017’s well-received Wonder Woman fails to live up to the standa...

As a writer by trade (at least before he started directing), David Koepp should know that a good ending is at least as important as a good beginning, if not more so.  You Should Have Left, a haunted house movie that doubles as an homage to St...