Search for 2020

Over the years, the “Rip Van Winkle” concept (inspired by the central conceit of the Washington Irving 1819 short story) has been used by a number of films. The idea – a person hibernating for a number of years and waking up to a vastly ...

Repression and desire are often inextricably entwined, with the two dynamics in opposition. Such is the case in Francis Lee’s clear-eyed but heart-wrenching period drama, Ammonite. As much a tale of the patriarchal suffocation of those who b...

Antebellum, a Twilight Zone-ish thriller from the writing/directing duo of Gerard Bush & Christopher Renz, takes its time establishing itself as one thing before transitioning to something completely different. The non-chronological nature of ...

What is it about fantasy novels that makes them so difficult to translate effectively to the silver screen? It’s not impossible – J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings adaptations are proof that i...

Has the passage of 18 years and the removal of Michael Bay from the director’s chair revived or redeemed the roadkill represented by the previous Bad Boys sequel? To a certain extent, yes, but only when one considers that the third installme...

Timeliness can be important in a film’s release, but it’s rarely all-important. Consider The Beach House, for example. Here’s a movie about people trapped in a shelter-in-place situation by an unknown contagion that has infiltrated the a...

Put this one squarely in the “guilty pleasure” category. And keep in mind that if you can’t be entertained by a thirteen-year old girl ruthlessly dispatching evil-doers in ways that will make a horror film fans tingle with glee, this may...

One of the criteria I often use to determine whether a documentary biography is “good” (as opposed to “mediocre”) is whether it provides something beyond what I could find by perusing the Wikipedia article about the subject. In the cas...

Bill & Ted Face the Music is a love letter for fans of the cult classic films Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. Designed with die-hards in mind, the concluding chapter of the trilogy brings back a few friendl...

It’s hard to imagine that something as vapid and chaotic as Birds of Prey (full title: Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) transpires in the same “universe” (the DCEU) as Joker. With its John Wick-inspire...