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The Smashing Machine is one of those biopics that falls into the trap of trying to do too much within a limited span of time. The tapestry woven by writer/director Benny Safdie is so dense that he might have had a better chance of realizing his vi...

The Social Reckoning should not be mistaken for a sequel to The Social Network, despite some obvious synergies. The critically lauded 2010 film focused on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg (now played by Jeremy Strong) has a pr...

A period piece thriller set during the Great Depression, The Weight echoes aspects of the classic The Wages of Fear without being a copy and suffers only from the occasional too-obvious contrivance used to increase suspense. Director Padraic McKin...

For the most part, Netflix has two modes of films: high-profile prestige projects and “lesser” titles that use recognizable stars to lure bigger audiences. The Woman in Cabin 10 fits snugly into the latter category. For lack of a better descri...

This is the sort of movie that gives “chick flicks” a bad name. It’s a cross between inept melodrama and a bad sit-com. The “comedy” (for lack of a better word) is obvious, poorly timed, and not especially funny. The “drama” (again, f...

The best things about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood are not elements that will build large audiences. This is a film about character development/disintegration and a comprehensive look at the early days of the oil industry. The more ...

The Farrelly Brothers' first two films, Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin, were outrageous, uncouth, bawdy, and unapologetically lowbrow. Their third film, There's Something about Mary, is all of those things and one more: hilarious. I rarely chuckl...

You know what they say about "too much of a good thing?" That applies to They Will Kill You, the English-language debut of Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov, whose hyperkinetic approach to killing Satanic cultists is initially funny, bracing, and t...

A Thin Line Between Love and Hate is muddled to the point of tedium. The screenplay is credited to four writers, and its unevenness argues that none of them were on the same wavelength. Subplots start but never finish, characters come and go...

When it was released in 1982, John Carpenter's remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 science fiction classic The Thing from Another World spurred much debate about not only which film was more effective but whether Carpenter's version fit better into the sc...