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You Make It Feel Like Christmas (Deluxe Edition)

“The luxurious retro treatment of last year’s You Make It Feel Like Christmas gets five songs appended in this deluxe edition. Gwen Stefani’s vibrato still sounds energized and comfortable among the Wall of Sound-style live instrumentation, yet the selection of covers still skews too hard on the ” read more

Dreamcar

“Super-group or side-project? Probably somewhere in-between, honestly, when all is said and done given one participant’s inability to focus on anything for very long. Dreamcar is a loving ode to mid-80s synthpop in all of its glory, and something of a reductive compression of the entire genre’s m” read more

The Rugrats Movie

“A popular television makes the leap to the big screen, and the limitations of the medium become greatly apparent. What makes the television show so enjoyable in more digestible form becomes bloated, and the adage that television is merely “a movie, but longer” is proven false. Sitcoms tend to ma” read more

Dancing Queen

“In one of her many hilarious moments of self-awareness, Cher proclaimed herself the Lazarus of pop music onstage during her set at the 1999 Divas Live show. It was right before she performed “Believe,” but it could just as easily reflect her seemingly inexhaustible ability to disappear and reapp” read more

The Assassin

“The Assassin is beautiful to behold, but there’s no narrative or character to give you a firm grasp. It’s hypnotic and narcotizing beauty for the sake of it with nothing to tether your interest. Character motivations, relationships, even a coherent story or timeline is all abstracted or diffused” read more

The Way He Looks

“Taking a short film, in this case I Don’t Want to Go Back Alone and blowing it up to feature-length can have unintended consequences of distorting the might and power of the original. Thank god that The Way He Looks extends that short’s empathy and compassion, and its minute details in which blo” read more

Moonrise Kingdom

“Whether or not you’ll engage with Moonrise Kingdom will be easily discerned whtin the opening minutes as it’s a free association of Wes Anderson’s numerous quirks and obsessions. We explore a familial home and the complicated relationship therein by viewing everything as if it were a series of” read more

Red Dragon

“The hard truth is this: Brett Ratner’s a “for hire” director without any vision of his own. His background is in music videos and this has left him with the distinct inability to let things breathe or rest. A suspenseful story wilts under his eye because of this, and Red Dragon plays like warm” read more

The Canyons

“Somehow Paul Schrader is behind the lens of this limp-dick erotic thriller? Man, we’re a long way off from the atmosphere and palpable tension of his greatest films, like the screenplay for Taxi Driver or his directorial work in Affliction. Just as two examples of his intellectual movie-making pro” read more

Pete's Dragon

“Disney’s love for orphans-in-the-wild was prominent in 2016 between this remake, their second live-action Jungle Book, and a journey into Roald Dahl’s macabre world in The BFG. All of them are best when detailing the quietest moments of the wild, imaginative lives of their urchins, especially Pe” read more

Ghostbusters II

“Five years separate the first film and this sequel, both in real-time and in the film’s continuity. And those five years have not been exactly kind to foursome, both in the film’s narrative and the final product. Ghostbusters II is a prime example of a sequel providing diminishing returns.   ” read more