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Midnighters takes a common situation – one fueled by too much alcohol and too little attentiveness while driving – and uses it as the jumping-off point for a series of events that puts a working class couple’s life into a tailspin. With ...

Ari Aster, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, has described his brand of filmmaking as “existential horror.” To be sure, it’s a much different breed of the genre than one typically finds in multiplexes, trading in jump scares for ...

The film opens in an amphitheater in Greece, with an appropriately-garbed Greek chorus chanting of the deeds of Achilles and Oedipus. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the masked men and women decide to switch to the tale of Lenny Weinrib (Woody Allen) -- d...

Most world renowned people have achieved that status as a result of something accomplished during their lives. Unfortunately, Daniel Pearl was among the few who became famous as a result of his death. Pearl's kidnapping and subsequent death at the...

When Mighty Joe Young first reached screens in 1949, nearly everyone recognized it as an attempt to re-create the magic and mystique of King Kong. Many of the same people were involved -- Ernest B. Schoedsack in the director's chair, Robert Armstr...

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates exemplifies what passes for “raunchy comedy” these days: plenty of vulgarity and profanity without many accompanying laughs. In trying to push the R-rated envelope, filmmakers have become so focused on bei...

For some reason, there has been a move by a few critics to politicize their reviews of Mile 22, Peter Berg’s tightly-constructed espionage thriller. I guess one side-effect of living in a hyper-partisan era is that some films aren’t allowe...

30 years have passed since the assassination of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and, the ballot passage of California's recent Proposition 8 notwithstanding, advances have been made in the area of gay rights, although there are still many hurd...

Miller’s Crossing, the Coen Brothers’ third film (following Blood Simple and Raising Arizona) introduced the kind of comedically-tinged approach they would employ for some of their darkest and most compelling films, including the criticall...

Movies that arrive in theaters with the tagline "based on a true story" often stray far from the historical basis underlying the narrative. As it's said, "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story." Unfortunately, in presenting the tale of...