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...

Mirage follows in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock thrillers and, more to the point, Stanley Donen’s success with the Hitchcockian Charade from 1963. Gregory Peck stars as a cost accountant with a ca...

Reading both vintage and modern reviews of The Great Escape, one finds countless examples of writers who describe the 1963 hit as “great escapism” or a timeless adventure. The film is seen as a stirri...

Children who watched The Witches in 1990 had nightmares from Roald Dahl’s bedtime story (I was one of them). In the film, which blends a don’t-talk-to-strangers message with a boy-becomes-mouse fantas...