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Going into Anora, I wasn’t sure what to expect but it certainly wasn’t a screwball comedy. Yet, following an explosively erotic, wild twist on the Pretty Woman cliché, writer/director Sean Baker guides his movie into an extended period of...

Arizona illustrates that, if a filmmaker intends to make a comedy-thriller, (s)he would be better served by emphasizing either the humor or the suspense, not trying to walk some invisible line down the middle. By choosing the latter option, f...

Calling Forrest Gump… Calling Forrest Gump… With The Butler, director Lee Daniels has managed to "Gump" the Civil Rights movement. That's not necessarily a bad thing but there are times when so many famous cameos threaten to become a distra...

These days, everyone wants a multiverse movie – Marvel, DC, and now the guys who made Swiss Army Man. If nothing else, Everything Everywhere All at Once shows that it can be done without committing a nine-figure sum to the production budget. Tha...

Grand Hotel, which captured the Best Picture Oscar in 1932 (the third of three years when the Academy Awards were held at the end of the year - they reverted to the first quarter in 1934, where they have remained), became a template of sorts for ma...

Over the past two decades, horror movies have increasingly gravitated toward jump-scare experiences: stories more interested in delivering sudden shocks than developing suspense through mood and atmosphere. This dumbing down of horror, which h...

Whatever else it may be cited for, The Paperboy, Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious, is not going be called "the feel-good movie of 2012." An unsettling period piece mystery (the period being the late 1960s), The Paperboy is steeped in the so-calle...

Precious (saddled with the unwieldy subtitle: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire) manages the task of being both heartbreaking and heart-warming, all without resorting to the kind of manipulation so often evident in dramas about underprivileged ki...