The pursuit of great ambition, when achievement doesn’t follow, can come at a cost of its own. Such is the case with Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s highly anticipated partnership with a reinvented Tom Cruise in their high-minded misadventure, Digger, a challenging movie to…
Read MoreRobert Pattinson in Primetime: Superb Performances Elevate Dark Matter of Catching Predators on TV
There is something decidedly unsettling about Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, which turns one of television’s seediest spectacles into a slick study of the people who turned it into ratings. He’s taken a notorious subject and fashioned it not as a critique of its criminals, but…
Read MoreA Summer Sleeper with Teeth: The End of Oak Street is a Dino Thriller With Old-School Charm
As a loving evocation of the early 1980s—or perhaps a nostalgic endearment for the era’s defining movies—David Robert Mitchell’s dino-thriller The End of Oak Street is a summer sleeper supreme, a nifty throwback so sharply crafted and performed that it may be the season’s…
Read MoreA year after its first teaser began selling out advance IMAX screenings, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arrives as a staggering movie, so big-canvas and exciting, yet so humanly observed, that it recalls the long-lost Hollywood epic, where heroic adventures were told with both scope…
Read MoreSexiness is back in American movies after an era of intimacy-averse Hollywood that all but erased the freewheeling “sex comedy” from screens. The reasons for its extended hiatus are many—polling from turned-off young moviegoers, post-#MeToo intimacy coordination and A-lister anxieties about viral screen grabs.…
Read MoreSupergirl is an early contender for 2026’s worst studio film, so lackluster that it fails to deliver even a single enjoyable scene (which is difficult to accomplish, even if you try!). This DC misfire, directed by Craig Gillespie, almost certainly will not come close to…
Read MoreThe best movie characters tend to stay with you after the closing credits, and in Carolina Caroline, Samara Weaving gives us one that really lingers. As a Texas dreamer turned lovestruck outlaw in Adam Carter Rehmeier’s renegade road movie, Weaving balances romantic abandon and…
Read More“It Was Always a Love Story”: Adam Carter Rehmeier on Carolina Caroline’s Road, Romance and Robberies
I knew Carolina Caroline had left its mark when I couldn’t stop thinking about its title character after my first viewing. On the second screening, I plugged into the rhythms of its central relationship and almost melancholic country-and-western lyricism, and the way star Samara…
Read MoreTuner, an offbeat character study about a troubled young New York piano tuner, is like a keyboard whose ivories are touched too lightly but beg for a more resonant plunk. From director Daniel Rohner, whose 2022 doc Navalny won an Oscar, it’s capably made…
Read MoreIs God Is: Myth, Memory and Trauma in Southern Gothic Revenge Tale of Serious Psychological Weight
The most welcome surprise of the 2026 movie year comes in Is God Is, a richly atmospheric tale of vengeance so dripping with attitude and atmosphere it practically oozes off the screen like humidity before a storm. Written and directed by first timer Aleshea…
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