Movie Reviews

  The Watchers marks the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of director M. Night Shyamalan. Since breaking out in 1999 with The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan has been one of the most polarizing directors over the last almost thirty years, so following in his footsteps is quite a task. But Ishana shows that she is a real-deal filmmaker with this well-made, eerie, flawed folk horror movie. The Watchers finds Mina (Dakota…

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is one of the greatest prequels ever made because it does everything a great prequel should do and does it well. It takes us back in time to give us a more in-depth look at a character we loved in a previous film. It expands the cinematic world in which the previous films took place while also showing us characters and places we’ve already met. It feels unique in its…

  Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing is a sensational movie. A beautiful, moving experience about rehabilitation, hope, brotherhood, and the importance of the arts. The film stars Colman Domingo as John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield, a wrongfully accused man serving time at Sing Sing prison in New York. During his time in prison, Divine G, a well-read and articulate writer, has formed an in-prison theater group where other inmates come together to write, act, and produce a…

  The Fall Guy is a perfect movie to kick off the summer season. It is by no means a perfect movie and is in fact very flawed, particularly with its plot, but it features all the hallmarks of a good summer movie. It’s got action, comedy, romance, tons of set pieces and explosions, and features two beautiful actors at the center who exude charisma. What more could you want? The Fall Guy follows Colt…

  Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a great film because of how effortlessly it blends what could have been two separate films together to make one great film. This is a love story and sports film, reminiscent of Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham. One film is a love triangle about two friends, one girl, and the ideas of past loves and what could have been. The other is a sports film about the competitive spirit. If these…

  A movie featuring Godzilla and King Kong together on screen should not be boring, and yet, watching Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the latest entry in the Monsterverse cinematic universe, I was consistently bored and underwhelmed. It is a movie that not only barely features Godzilla and King Kong fighting together, but barely features them on screen together, despite them being the titular duo. Instead, we get a movie that features the same…

  In 2019, Joel and Ethan Coen, the award-winning filmmaking brothers behind such films as Raising Arizona, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski, announced that they were splitting up because Ethan Coen was “giving movies a rest” and wanted to focus on stage plays and did not want to work on Joel’s next project, The Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan has now returned to the directors’ chair with Drive-Away Dolls, a zany lesbian road-trip movie that felt…

  I normally don’t pay attention to the press tours of movies, where the filmmakers and the actors are interviewed by dozens upon dozens of media and press outlets to promote their latest movie, but it was impossible to escape the press tour for Madame Web, particularly the clips involving the film’s star Dakota Johnson. Johnson’s dry, off-beat brand of humor was in full force in these interviews, as she talked about how “chaotic” shooting…

  Movies don’t get much bigger than Denis Villenuve’s Dune: Part Two, the action-packed and surprisingly emotional continuation of 2021’s Dune: Part One. Dune: Part Two continues the story of Paul Atreidis (Timothée Chalamet) and his journey to get revenge on House Harkonnen for killing his father and overtaking House Atreidis on the planet of Arrakis. Part Two picks up right where Part One ended with Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) having joined…

  In my review last year of Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla, I wrote briefly about movies with similar subjects coming out within a year of each other, like Armageddon and Deep Impact, Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, Elvis and Priscilla, and the list goes on. We’ve just done that again in the forms of Reality and Winner, two films that look at NSA whistleblower Reality Winner (her actual name) who leaked government documents in 2017 showing Russia’s…