George A. Romero’s critique of materialism in Dawn of the Dead (1978) likened zombies to mindless consumers, but Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake wipes away the original allegory and replaces it with freneti...

Bernini’s sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa came to mind watching the extraordinary debut of writer-director Rose Glass, whose Saint Maud could be viewed as a monstrous horror film or a character stud...

Willy’s Wonderland belongs to a subgenre of movies with loglines like “Nicolas Cage fights a satanic cult with chainsaws” or “Nicolas Cage fights monsters from a fallen meteorite.” His presence sells ...

About 30 minutes into Drop Dead Gorgeous, I became aware of the expression on my face. It probably resembled something like that of the third judge of the movie’s teenage beauty pageant. Played by scr...

What chance does the value of human life have against the sway of money and power? Not much. That’s the lesson driving Bryan Fogel’s latest documentary, The Dissident, about Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi...

Wonder Boys belongs to a rare class of films that inspire us to write. Throughout its meandering story, its characters discover, or rediscover, their essential need to find “truth” through their writi...

At one point in the concert film American Utopia, David Byrne thanks his audience “for leaving your homes.” Watching in the midst of a pandemic, where going to either a live performance or cinematic e...

The biggest problem with Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula is the title and the expectation it creates. The movie does not feature a train, nor does it spend much time in the South Korean city of Bus...

In Freaky, Blumhouse once again creates moviegoer catnip by adding a horror twist to an established, pointedly non-horror genre. With Happy Death Day (2017), the company folded a slasher into the same...