Movie Reviews

There is a central question every haunted house movie must answer: Once the characters witness conclusive proof that said house is haunted, why do they stay? A creaky old home filled with ghosts is an unsettling prospect, certainly, but one with a pretty obvious solution: If the house is haunted, leave the house! In that way, bad haunted house

Dumb Money introduces hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin (played by Seth Rogen) as he surveys the work being done on an enormous seaside mansion. It looks like he’s building some sort of dream home for his family — but a few moments later, we learn the house is not under construction; it’s under destruction. Plotkin actually lives next

If there was any justice in the world, the rise of streaming would spark revivals of the genres that the traditional studios have abandoned — i.e. pretty much all of the ones that don’t involve superheroes or science-fiction. The erotic thriller (or really any picture that deals with matters of sexuality in a serious way) seems like exactly the sort

If an actor sticks around in Hollywood long enough, their most meaningful onscreen relationship isn’t with any of their co-stars. It’s with time itself. Popular actors age, they get older, they shift roles from sons to fathers to grandfathers. They turn gray, they get wrinkles, they remove the wrinkles, they dye their hair. The degree to which

In hindsight, The Exorcist: Believer poster I found tossed in a urinal in the movie theater bathroom before tonight’s press screening was probably a bad omen. You might even call it a sign from God. And like so many of the foolish mortals in this new film, I failed to heed His warnings. For my sins, I was damned for

Alexander Payne knows how to set a mood. He begins his 1970-set dramedy The Holdovers with the sorts of MPAA ratings cards, company logos, and opening titles that would have appeared in a movie that was actually made in 1970. The Holdovers’ distributor, Focus Features, didn’t exist in 1970, so Payne went to the trouble of creating a period-appropriate

Right now on Season 2 of Loki, the heroes are racing around all of space and time fighting to preserve the very fabric of the multiverse. When something goes wrong, they characters fall apart like actual fabric; they dissolve into thousands of individual strands, as if they were each a handmade sweater and someone pulled all their threads apart simultaneously.Whatever you think of Loki, that

In my review of the first Venom, I wrote “The only thing stopping this movie from becoming an immediate cult classic is that it takes nearly an hour for Tom Hardy to go full Venom. If they’d trimmed 15 minutes out of this thing, cut right to the chase, and just piled on the Hardy, Venom would be

People are complicated creatures; they contain many contradictory impulses, emotions, and behaviors. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon aims to capture the contradictions of one such man by being a movie with almost as many different shades as the historical giant at its center. At times, Napoleon is a costume drama. For long stretches, it is a bloody war film. And occasionally — in its

I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life. I don’t do drugs. My vice is food. My wife and I save up so that once or twice a year we can go to an extravagant restaurant and spend a couple hours eating what we hope will be an extravagantly delicious meal. We dream of places like