Jay Duplass’ The Baltimorons is the kind of movie that starts amiable and amusing only to sneak up on you with surprising feeling. It’s been a remarkably strong year for small, handmade indies (Friendship, A Little Prayer, Splitsville, Twinless, Preparation for the Next Life),…
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Bing Liu has built a pair of terrific films around the question of how young people come of age when the odds are stacked against them. His Oscar-nominated 2018 doc Minding the Gap charted several years in the lives of three skateboarding friends in…
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It’s been awhile since Darren Aronofsky delivered a film as sharp as Caught Stealing, his most commercial-friendly outing yet and an unexpected late-summer surprise. Working from Charlie Huston’s screenplay of his own novel, Aronofsky shapes a gritty and unpredictable New York crime tale that…
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A comedy has one job—to make you laugh—and if it fires off a gag a minute and you only chuckle a handful of times, it isn’t working. By that barometer, the new Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson in the deadpan Police Squad! mode…
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If you grew up as a teen boy in the 1980s and had even a cursory interest in movies, you surely fell in love with the horror movie renaissance that shaped the first half of that decade (and is still imitated, reconfigured and meta-ed…
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In their new film She Rides Shotgun, director Nick Rowland and actor Taron Egerton deliver a tense experience fusing the grit and danger of a crime picture with the vulnerability of a fractured father-daughter relationship. Adapted from the novel by Jordan Harper, the story…
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Nostalgia can be a wonderfully horrible thing, especially when what’s being romanticized rarely lines up with reality. Such is the case with the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, an attempt to resurrect a ’90s slasher franchise that was competent enough, sure—but…
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Ari Aster’s Eddington is unlike anything else this year in its sprawling attempt to reckon with the fractured state of American life in 2020. Set in a fictional town in New Mexico, the film follows a slow-burning conflict between a conservative sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix)…
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Across four films, 38-year-old writer-director Ari Aster has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema. Breaking out with 2018’s trauma thriller Hereditary and 2019’s pagan horror Midsommar, Aster took a turn with the surreal 2023 panic attack Beau Is Afraid. Tonally disparate but thematically linked,…
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Writer-director Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, winner of this year’s Sundance Film Festival screenwriting prize, is a deceptively modest indie, one made in spare style but delivering a quietly powerful punch in confronting the long-term fallout of sexual assault. Trauma splits life into a before…
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