Ask weary WWE viewers to identify why the professional-wrestling titan’s creative direction has gone so stagnant and you’ll hear one answer time and again: lack of competition. It’s no coincidence that the company’s late-‘90s heyday ran concurrent with the rise of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, which at one point…
Drone warfare is a moral gray area, and this movie is on it. Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky stands alongside Drones and Good Kill as the cinematic equivalent of online commenters shouting “First!” on a hot topic but not bothering to say anything new or insightful about it. As…
If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China’s highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
Jane Got a Gun’s reputation precedes it, but it shouldn’t define it. After a tortured production that included the departure of original director Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and a revolving door of leading men, the Western arrives in theaters long after popular opinion declared…
There are worse ways for a television star to transition into film than a horror movie. There are also better movies to do it in than The Boy. Still, Lauren Cohan of The Walking Dead shines bright in William Brent Bell’s dim genre exercise, a vital presence opposite a lifeless…
Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity: the spontaneous “USA! USA!” chant that erupts after an out-of-his-mind Zac Efron announces to spring breakers that he’s just unknowingly smoked crack, or Aubrey Plaza commanding as foreplay that Robert De Niro, as the…
One of our most enduring cinematic genres, horror is also among the most difficult to do right. This may sound obvious — countless attempts are made to scare moviegoers every year, whether in theaters or, increasingly, streaming online — but it’s brought into focus by the few that actually make…
As cinematic year 2015 reaches its end, the FOMO specter threatens to haunt us all. If you pored over the results of our film poll and felt aghast at how many apparently great movies you’ve yet to see, here at last is a chance to catch up without braving traffic. About…
Adapted from Amy-Jo Albany’s memoir about growing up with her father, Joe, the jazz pianist best known for playing with Charlie Parker, Low Down stars John Hawkes and Elle Fanning as a father-daughter duo with a lot of love and even more problems. A charming, gifted musician with a heroin…
If the Saw series taught us anything, it’s that every quasi-inventive genre movie is fated to become a yearly franchise with increasingly diminishing returns. The Purge practically cried out for this treatment from its premise alone: James DeMonaco’s film had a big idea — a near-future in which “any and…
Comedies about the battle of the sexes tend to have one clear loser: the audience. Driven by an oppositional view of romance that proved outmoded and seldom funny, Think Like a Man introduced us to six men living in Los Angeles and their corresponding flames. Some of these entanglements were…
Although first viewings of most films should be experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible, few benefit as much from walking in cold as The Wicker Man. Newly restored in a “final cut” that’s apparently what the filmmaker originally put together before the distributor trimmed it down for double…
When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing 17 years later, was a noted…
