Seriously confused thriller that rushes past the important details when they do happen, but Domino has redeemable moments if you are a Brian DePalma completist like I am. On the upper end, it takes place in Copenhagen, Brussels and Spain, it has some sly DePalma cinematography […]

It’s practically a given by now: rock star biopics where the emphasis is on the many lows and pitfalls, to the point where the hero has lost his humanity before he gets it back in a jiffy. Elton John was never one of my favorite musicians, but I learned to like a lot about him […]

It started with Howard Hawks’ 1940 cream of the crop newspaper comedy “His Girl Friday,” or perhaps even earlier with Ernst Lubistch’s 1932 grifter comedy “Trouble in Paradise,” the motor mouth, rapid-fire dialogue exchanges where boy and girl shoot wit back and forth with each other with such natural aplomb that it’s high art. Eighty […]

He catches fish and then cuts it up to eat like sushi rather than creating the luxury of fire to cook it. Mads Mikkelsen is the latest to get his own one-man survivalist tale that allows an actor to act with more sweat and tears than with the aid of dialogue. Arctic is not going […]

There will be more “important movies” or “sensibly humanist movies” to come out in 2019, but none will take us vicariously into the extreme depths of depravity like Gaspar Noe’s Climax […]

In the women in roles of men remake “The Hustle,” the chicanery is too loud, too conspicuous, too in the moment slapdash, too blustery […]

Rom-coms have been infrequent in recent years despite their once unstoppable popularity. Do we now need an avenger in one just to get a green light? We do now have Long Shot which has half-baked […]

When it comes to the list, I have no proclivity to win popular tastes. I have a few hits, a few misunderstood titles I want to defend, a few obscure titles and a few I am predicting will be discovered with cult devotion decades down the line […]

Outer space as a black pit with an avante-garde concentration on claustrophobia, dissension and debasement. Famed female French director Claire Denis has made her first English language film with an inordinately high budget (for her) with High Life, and to me, this cerebral science fiction […]

Olivia Wilde in her career has long played the tough cookie who crumbles just in time for the man to come in and rescue her. This time in A Vigilante, Wilde is the avenger of domestic abusers, a serious, rigid and ascetic one […]

“Alright, Alright, Alright,” is not something Matthew McConaughey says in his new anything flies avante-garde comedy The Beach Bum. McConaughey goes full method actor and makes his own special stoned creation Moondog […]

The first shot is a simple one, but already you know you’re in the hands of a master filmmaker. Jordan Peele came out of the gate with the standards raising horror film “Get Out,” and already his second film Us is more technically assured in what supports another head-spinning […]