Spin-off movies for Batman villains have been a mixed bag over the years. “Joker” won an Oscar, but it was followed up with the terrible “Joker: Folie à Deux.” “Suicide Squad” took Harley Quinn from niche fan-favorite to mainstream icon, but “Catwoman” somehow managed to bungle one of the most marketable castings in movie history. Now comes “Clayface,” based a character known to those who follo...
Oct 30, 2026
The biggest problem with new video game adaptation “Street Fighter” is that it’s bad on purpose. Not “delightfully over the top” or “destined to become a cult classic,” just bad. As if having a degree of self-awareness about its unapologetic badness somehow justifies wasting two hours of its audience’s time. The story follows a pair of former best friends — Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken (Noah Ce...
Oct 23, 2026
The title “Other Mommy” is misleading. The villainous demon haunting 8-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) can take any form, including her father (Jay Duplass), her babysitter (Sean Kaufman), or even a complete stranger. But yes, much of the time it impersonates her mother (Jessica Chastain). The reason, I suspect, has less to do with the fraught mother-daughter relationship and more to do...
Oct 14, 2026
“Verity” wishes it was a twisty thriller. It is indeed twisty, but it doesn’t have the heart to be a thriller. The film’s advertising is clearly positioning it as a successor to last year’s hit front-of-the-bookstore novel adaptation “The Housemaid,” though it is based on a book that predates that film’s source material by four years. In fact, it is based on a novel by the popular Colleen Hoo...
Oct 9, 2026
In “Primetime,” Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, host of “To Catch a Predator,” an offshoot of NBC’s “Dateline” news program in the mid-2000’s. Hansen and the show’s production team would coordinate with police to lure child predators (via Internet chatrooms where there would be no ambiguity as to their intent) to locations where they would be ambushed, first by Hansen and his cameras, th...
Oct 2, 2026
The streak is over. The last time I started a review with that phrase, it was to mean something bad — 2022’s “Lightyear” was the first Pixar movie that I didn’t recommend. This time, it’s something good — Zach Cregger’s new take on “Resident Evil” is the first movie based on a video game that I do recommend. Not surprisingly, the man who directed Amy Madigan to an Oscar last year for “Weapons”...
Sep 25, 2026
A few days before I saw “The Conjuring: Last Rites,” a friend of mine asked me about my plans for the weekend. I told her that I planned to see the film, and I was excited. When she asked me why I was excited to see yet another entry in the generally-middling “Conjuring” series, I blurted out, “They make such a cute couple!” “They” of course being Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as real-life...
Sep 12, 2025
“Thunderbolts*” certainly scared off the competition in its second weekend at the domestic box office. This sometimes happens the weekend after the opening of a huge blockbuster. Other studios will know that they can’t compete against the powerhouse, so they hold off on releasing anything that they think has the potential to be a big or even midsize hit. THEN that happens, I have to review e...
May 16, 2025
If “A Minecraft Movie” is the commercial hit that 2025 needed, then “Sinners” is the creative hit it needed. Writer/director Ryan Coogler has delivered a film that starts off as a compelling-enough 1930’s period piece before wildly shifting into supernatural territory. But the later developments don’t devalue the efforts made in the setup, they simply put the well-established characters on a...
Apr 25, 2025
It has been 15 years since famed archeologist/ adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) was onscreen in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and even longer since he was onscreen in a decent movie. Fans were worried if that creative flop would be the last they’d ever see of Indy, but now he has a second chance to make a last impression. With new director James Mangold at the h...
Jul 14, 2023
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