Movie Reviews

  There is one great thing about Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life, and that is Amanda Peet. Peet, who came to prominence in the early 2000s in such films as The Whole Nine Yards, Saving Silverman, and Identity but has not been in a theatrical film since 2015’s Sleeping With Other People, gives a spectacular performance as Dianne, an actress and mother who hires Sam (Shear) to be the family’s au pair as she prepares for…

  It Ends starts with four friends, Tyler (Mitchell Cole), James (Phinehas Yoon), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Day (Akira Jackson) are on a seemingly late-night cruise. Their GPS has them make a right turn down a dark road. After driving down the road for a bit, they turn around to go back to the main highway, only for them to continue driving on the same road. They soon realize they might be on a never-ending…

  Jay Duplass crafts one of the best Christmas movies in recent years with The Baltimorons, a sweet and uproarious Christmas journey through the heart of Baltimore. Cliff (Michael Strassner), a recently sober former improv comic, is on his way to his girlfriend’s (Olivia Luccardi) parents’ house on Christmas Eve when an accident at the front stoop forces him to take an emergency trip to the dentist. It being Christmas Eve, not many dentists’ offices…

  Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April is one of the toughest filmgoing experiences I have had in a long time. This is a raw, unflinching, and uncompromising look at what women are going through in present-day Georgia. Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an OB-GYN and one of the most respected doctors around, faces accusations after a newborn passes away shortly after birth. With her life under a microscope during the investigation, Nina continues to pursue her medical duties, including…

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a blockbuster that needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible. It’s a steamy, bloody, gory vampire tale that features lavish sets, stunning costumes and cinematography, strong themes, and is led by one of the best movie stars working today. Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932, Sinners follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both portrayed marvelously by Michael B. Jordan) as they return to their hometown following a stint in…

  A Working Man is a movie whose only purpose is to let moviegoers watch Jason Statham beat the living hell out of dozens of bad people. It doesn’t care about the story, and the characters are forgettable and might as well not have actual names. They would have been better suited with names like Henchmen #1 or Bike Rider #2. The body count is almost uncountable, and the finale is a barrage of bullets,…

  The inciting incident of Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn is just that, the apparent death of a unicorn. En route to a weekend retreat at his boss’s cabin in the deepest part of the wilderness, Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortego) accidentally hit a unicorn with their car and seemingly put it out of its misery. Instead of leaving it on the road where they hit it, they pack the…

  Director Bong Joon Ho follows up his 2019 Oscar-winning sensation Parasite with Mickey 17, an entertaining and layered sci-fi epic that finds the director at his lightest and most optimistic. Mickey 17 follows Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a meek man who got into some financial trouble on Earth when his “friend” Timo (Steven Yeun) convinced him to open a macaroon shop. Turns out Timo is a bad person and got him and Mickey mixed up…

  It feels like every year at Sundance I see a movie that would have been better off being a short film rather than a feature. A film that has an interesting concept and a great beginning only for it to run out of steam rather quickly, leaving us with what feels like an unfinished film. At the 2025 Sundance Film Festival that film was Sophie Brooks’s Oh, Hi, a romantic comedy that has a…

  Amir ‘Questlove’ Thompson is quickly cementing himself as one of the best music documentarians we have working today. Following his Oscar-winning Summer of Soul, Thompson brings us another energetic and insightful music-focused documentary with SLY LIVES! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) which looks at the life and music of Sly Stone. Unlike another Sundance musical biopic, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, where I went in basically blind to knowing any music about the…