Movie Reviews

  Twisters is a classic summer blockbuster. It’s a big, loud, silly, entertaining spectacle that features action, drama, comedy, and romantic tension. It features scenes that will have your jaw on the floor in amazement and scenes that will have your eyes rolling to the back of your head because of its corniness or stupidity. It’s the kind of summer blockbuster we don’t see much of anymore. Twisters opens with a harrowing sequence that finds…

  Director Ti West’s MaXXXine is the third and seemingly final installment of his X Trilogy (though he has hinted in being interested in a fourth film) and the film is entertaining, twisted, and violent, something we have come to expect from this series of movies. But it suffers from something a lot of third films suffer from in that it has an over-stuffed and rushed plot that takes away from what made the previous…

  Tuesday is a strange bird of a movie, literally and figuratively. I’ve seen several movies in my years about death and people learning to cope with it, but never one quite like this. Though it takes a bit to get going, Tuesday is a unique and emotionally harrowing film about a mother coming to terms with her daughter’s death. Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as Zora, whose daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is terminally ill. Zora can’t…

  The Dead Don’t Hurt is Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen’s second directorial effort following 2020’s Falling and while it is an improvement from Falling, I still find myself struggling with Mortensen as a director. Though shot well with some good performances, The Dead Don’t Hurt never fully clicked for me and ended up being a film I found mostly boring despite some moments of greatness. The Dead Don’t Hurt is a western and love story…

  I saw What You Wish For at the Chicago Critics and to be honest, it was not one of my most anticipated movies of the festival. The film was barely on my radar as a movie coming out this year. The only reason I went to see it was because following the film was a screening of Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead on 35 mm (which was amazing) so I thought I’d give…

  Last Stop in Yuma County finds several strangers stranded at a diner in the middle of Arizona waiting for a gas truck to come to the neighboring gas station. The strangers include a knife salesman (Jim Cummings), a pair of thieves who just robbed a bank (Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan), the diner’s lone waitress (Jocelin Donahue), a couple looking for trouble (Ryan Masson and Sierra McCormick), and an older couple (Gene Jones and…

  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…