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Roman J. Israel, Esq.

“Boy, the Academy must love Denzel Washington to sit through this movie long enough to decide that his performance was nomination worthy. Roman J. Israel, Esq. is an unfocused legal thriller, allegedly, orbiting around Washington’s movie star charisma. Often times, this is enough to get its lead ac” read more

The Boss Baby

“A two word premise that’s been stretched out to 97 minutes with a fair number of borderline nihilistic and confused messages going on, The Boss Baby has got to be one of the worst movies ever nominated for an Oscar. There’s clearly a very muddled message about an older sibling’s feelings of re” read more

The Fury

“A clear signpost for Brian De Palma’s transition away from the more experimental early half of his career and towards the more coherent latter half, The Fury still plays out a smorgasbord of ideas thrown against a wall and waiting to see what sticks. Pumped full of so many detours and tonal change” read more

Best in Show

“Out of all of Christopher Guest’s mockmentary comedies, freewheeling exercises of improvised comedy with some of the best in the business, Best in Show clearly lives up to its title. This particular style of comedy is the one with the greatest degree of difficulty to execute. If you give too much ” read more

The Iron Giant

“A variation of the “boy and his dog” genre, but also something much deeper and more mature than that synopsis would suggest, The Iron Giant is a little movie with a powerful punch. Released in the summer of 1999, The Iron Giant was buried beneath an avalanche of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and” read more

Queen of Earth

“Two privileged women (Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston) retreat up to a remote cabin every summer, but something’s very different about this year’s trip. Not only do the women learn just how far they’ve drifted from each other, but one of them seems on the precipice of a complete emotional ” read more

Looney Tunes: Back in Action

“The general sense I get from this is that Joe Dante wanted to make one film, and the studio just kept muzzling him for whatever reason. Who knows why, but maybe it was a fear that the denizens of Termite Terrace needed to be softer to be more palatable to modern audiences. I don’t know, it’s jus” read more

The Last Unicorn

“I didn’t grow up with The Last Unicorn, so this was actually an entirely fresh viewing experience for me. I knew nothing about it going in, and I was pleasantly surprised by it all. Not everything works, and some of it hampers or outright harms the overall vibrancy and coherence of the tone, but t” read more

Spawn

“Hey, remember when this was roughly as good as we could hope to get with comic book movies? I do, and thank god the days of Spawn and its far too numerous ilk are long behind us. If anything, Spawn should remain in the 90s when its hardcore, edgy aesthetic was the norm in the medium, and has simply ” read more

The Parent Trap

“Personally, my favorite thing about The Parent Trap is how the all-American twins played by Hayley Mills manage to speak in her posh, rounded British tones throughout. Not a dig against Mills’ acting or the strength of her dual performance in making a patently absurd premise work, more of a mere o” read more

Three Coins in the Fountain

“A stunning bit of picturesque travelogue and anodyne emotionally, Three Coins in the Fountain is a rusty bit of classic film-making and nothing more. You know the general plot, American girl meets handsome foreign boy, complications, then happily ever after. Just times that basic plot premise times ” read more

She Talks to Rainbows

“The Ronettes were a girl group that always flirted with being too much, and their sound was frequently more aggressive and dangerous than many of their counterparts and contemporaries. It was all in the way that Ronnie Spector sang. Her voice was filled with carnal knowledge, a playful adolescence, ” read more

A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

“A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector is the sound of the super-producer taking his trademark “Wall of Sound” style and smashing beloved Christmas carols into it. “Winter Wonderland” and “White Christmas” now have more in common with “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “He’s a Rebel” tha” read more

You Make It Feel Like Christmas

“If you had asked me what I thought a potential Gwen Stefani Christmas album would sound like, I’d probably respond with something along the lines of the bratty New Wave of the Waitresses song “Christmas Wrapping,” maybe the synthpop of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” (more on that song later), ” read more

Merry from Lena

“Not quite standard yuletide fare but rather a lounge club act centered on the Christmas spirit, Merry from Lena zips and swings with Lena Horne’s trademark sultry and jazzy vocals and bits of adult-oriented humor to give it plenty of flavor. “Jingle All the Way,” a reworking of “Jingle Bells” read more

Compulsion

“The true crime story of Leopold and Loeb is something that continues to entrance audiences with its layers of complicated motivations and deviant behavior, add in a dash of homosexuality and Nietzschian ideology and the whole thing practically comes gift wrapped with tabloid glamour. The best known ” read more

Panama Hattie

“This one feels like a second-tier throwaway from MGM’s infamous Arthur Freed unit. Panama Hattie is only as good and entertaining as any individual scene in the movie, and some of it is truly uninspired or downright dumb. I’m thinking of just about any of the scenes with a precocious Jackie Horn” read more

The Towering Inferno

“The all-star disaster epics of the 1970s were a strange little time capsule, as if the ethical quagmires and pervasive paranoia of the era could only be expressed in blockbusters that trapped a bunch of people in an isolated spot and made sure to shockingly kill off several of the big names every so” read more

Angel, Angel, Down We Go

“Angel, Angel, Down We Go, also known as Cult of the Damned, is a doozy of a head trip. I can’t even describe the plot, and won’t even try since none of it makes any sense and none of it feels consequential, but I can say it’s worth a glance. Don’t let my low star rating fool you, this isn’” read more

The Idol

“After four years away from the screen, and the first work post-David O. Selznick’s passing, Jennifer Jones makes for a curious figure. She seems ill-suited to the role here, and vaguely embarrassed by the things asked of her in the part. There’s nothing about her performance that is as flagrantl” read more

Tender is the Night

“The interior writing style of F. Scott Fitzgerald is practically impossible to adapt to film. It takes work for us to invest and understand the interior life of these characters, and this adaptation fails to do that. Many of these characters are not as sharply observed as they are in his novel, and ” read more

A Farewell to Arms

“This left me like Elaine in the Seinfeld episode where she’s forced to watch The English Patient, just staring at the screen and seething, “No, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. It’s too long….Just die already! DIE!” Looking at the critical reception of the day and the more recently, I” read more

The Barretts of Wimpole Street

“A remake of the 1934 version with the same director (who allegedly shot the exact same script) leading the charge, this version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street is a dull bit of coloring by the numbers. Director Sidney Franklin feels like he’s on autopilot, and so does much of the resulting drama” read more

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

“There’s an exchange late in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit that sums up the movie better than I can. While discussing a speech for work Gregory Peck presses Jennifer Jones for her opinion on it, and she dubs it a bit boring. Peck responds, “Is that all, just boring?” Jones pauses for a momen” read more

Good Morning, Miss Dove

“The treacle and sentimentality is heavy with this one. Good Morning, Miss Dove is a film that whips itself into crocodile tears and pours syrup over every frame in its story of a spinster teacher finding herself as a town’s beloved member. There’s curious case of unknown emphasis here, as though” read more

Terminal Station

“If the main criticism of Terminal Station can be summarized it would be: grand ambitions thwarted by a series of never-ending problems. Much like with the Archers and Gone to Earth, producer David O. Selznick continually fought at cross-purposes with his director on the film, and created an alternat” read more

Beat the Devil

“From the first frame on this thing just screams “cult classic” with its pervasive close-ups of character actors, a compulsively watchable hang-out vibe, and a sense that all of the action is taking place with gigantic quotes around it. Beat the Devil, easily the oddest film in Humphrey Bogart an” read more

Justice League

“Let’s start with the good, Justice League is a leap above both Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and about on par with Man of Steel. So clearly, WB/DC may be heading in the right direction with the material, finally, but it’s still bogged down by numerous problems. Chiefly, t” read more

The Lure

“What a glorious mess this is! The Lure takes the familiar story of The Little Mermaid and presents it as a horror-musical set in 1980s Poland. If that sounds an exercise you’re willing to endure, and I really hope that you are, then you’ll find a lot to enjoy in The Lure, even when it doesn’t ” read more

Black Girl

“Ousmane Sembène’s first feature film is a searing indictment of the stain of colonialism, of how it continues to infect us in ways both crystal clear and subterranean. Black Girl is a brief but powerful debut feature film, and a modern classic worth discovering.   Sembène’s political fury ” read more