The opening ten minutes or so of Great Gerwig’s Barbie are truly magical. Through the voiceover of Helen Mirren, Gerwig establishes that there are two worlds: there is the “Real World”, where real humans live, and Barbieland, a matriarchal utopia that is inhabited by several different variations of Barbie, like President Barbie, Doctor Barbie, and Lawyer Barbie, among other occupations. Their counterparts in Barbieland are all named Ken (and there is one named Allan,…

  The League is an informative and excellent documentary about the Negro League, the all Black baseball league that produced some of the greatest baseball players to ever play the game, like Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and Satchel Paige. The film looks at how the League got started in the late 1800s, the struggles it faced, and the effect it had on Black America and its communities. When most people think about the Negro League…

  Much of the advertising for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has been centered around the film’s centerpiece action scene, which finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, doing the stunt himself, as we’ve come to expect) driving a motorcycle off of a cliff and opening a parachute on the way down. The advertisers at Paramount were right to focus on that scene because it lives up to the anticipation. It is a breathtaking sequence…

  Writer/director Wes Anderson’s newest film, Asteroid City, finds the director firing on all cylinders in a movie that defines what a Wes Anderson movie is: visually stunning, immaculately constructed, a stellar ensemble cast, funny and bright with layers of sadness to it. The film opens in a black-and-white, nearly squared frame with a Twilight Zone-like Host (Bryan Cranston) explaining that we are about to watch a television program about the making of a play…

  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise that first kicked off over forty years ago with Raiders of the Lost Arc. Though it is missing some of the magic and technical mastery of the previous Indiana Jones films, this is a rousing and entertaining send-off to one of cinema’s greatest heroes. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny takes place in 1969 shortly after the…

  Following his films Phoenix, Transit, and Undine, director Christian Petzold has become one of my favorite filmmakers working today. His films are masterfully made, and he always gets great performances from his actors. His latest film, Afire, continues Petzold’s trend of great movies. But unlike his previous films which took us back to the World War II era or dealt with fantastical romances, Afire is a movie set in the real world that looks…

  The Unknown Country is an outstanding movie that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Inspired by the likes of Wim Wenders and Agnes Varda, director Morrisa Maltz crafted an emotional and arresting journey through Midwest and Western America. In the film, Tana (Lily Gladstone), drives from Minnesota to Dallas searching for some catharsis following the death of her grandmother. She makes various stops, from gas stations to motels to an Indian Reservation her…

  Growing up, it felt like everyone knew someone who had a BlackBerry, the iconic smartphone with a keyboard that produced that infectious clicking sound. I know my father had one and still talks to this day about how much he loved it. BlackBerry phones dominated the cell phone market for years in the early 2000s. But now, they don’t even sniff the surface of relevancy in the cell phone market. How did the most…

  Andy Muschietti’s The Flash is a bad film. A soulless, ugly, dumb film that perfectly symbolizes everything that is wrong and has been wrong with the films of the DC Extended Universe. It is a movie that only exists for fanboys and Twitter.  Everything that happens in The Flash feels like a series of random events, characters, and plots that were thrown together in an attempt to make a movie. It follows Barry Allen/The…