January tends to be a dumping ground for movies. Everyone’s wrapped up in awards talk, and studios are busy pushing their films for Oscar consideration. Sometimes, as a critic, I wonder if studios can walk and chew gum at the same time, much less release a big-budget action film in January while trying to navigate …
Alan Cerny
As someone who was there at the beginning of that fateful summer of 1977, I’ve ridden the highs and the lows of the Star Wars saga over the years. During that time, there have been, shall we say, some truths I’ve clung to that depended greatly on my own point of view. I’ve reevaluated these films …
To use a baseball metaphor, the idea of Tom Hanks playing Fred Rogers is a lot like a 70-mile-per-hour fastball pitched right across the plate to someone like Hank Aaron or Mickey Mantle – you just know that little white stitcher is long gone. Who else but Hanks to play Fred Rogers? You could cast …
In the trailer for Ford v Ferrari, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) takes Henry Ford Jr. (Tracy Letts) on something of a test ride in the new race car that has been built to attempt to beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in France. Shelby drives very fast, making hairpin turns, the race …
Unlike the Twinkie (supposedly), zombie movies don’t seem to have an expiration date. And so we get Zombieland: Double Tap, a 10-years-later sequel to 2009’s Zombieland that, at first blush, doesn’t seem to be a movie we necessarily needed or wanted. Ruben Fleischer’s original film was an enjoyable comedy with some fun, gnarly zombie kills and …
Conflict is the basis of drama, and there are few dramatic conflicts as powerful as the exploration of class. Everyone alive feels that conflict – the societal obligations for those who are not well off to rise above their status, while those who are already well off strive to keep their positions while, consciously or …
Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is an engine of perfect entertainment. From the opening moments, we are swept into the story and characters, and it feels completely confident and effortless. It’s old-fashioned in all the best ways but it also has modern sensibilities and themes that give the film weight and substance. The murder mystery, as a …
Robert Eggers’ The Witch (or The VVitch if you prefer) is a polarizing film. Now that we have a little distance from it, and now that we’ve seen something of the trends happening in the horror genre since then, that film is a moment in independent film – that there are stories to be told in …
Eddie Murphy is back. The best Eddie Murphy movies are those where it feels like he has something to prove. It’s been a few years since we’ve had a completely engaged Eddie. His strongest films have always been those when Eddie has a little glint in his eye right before he lays his cards on …
These days, science fiction films aren’t necessarily about the ideas but the spectacle. Many have several hundred-million-dollar budgets, gigantic CGI moments, and actors who work against green screens all day playing pretend on a wide scale. And while those films done right are perfectly enjoyable, it feels like something has been lost. Great character work, …
I have been obsessed with Alien since I was nine years old, and my parents refused to take me to a movie theater to see it. For Christmas that year, they bought me a book full of shots from the film, and I closely examined every single frame I could, from the face hugger sequence to …
H. P. Lovecraft is a notoriously difficult author to adapt to film. There have been a thousand riffs off his work over the years, with varying degrees of success, but to directly bring his work to the screen can be problematic at best. Back when authors were paid for every word, during the era of …
Young Jojo Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is a good little Nazi. He worships Adolf Hitler – so much so that he imagines Adolf (Taika Waititi) giving him advice during times of difficulty. In Germany, during the waning days of World War II, Jojo and his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), try to manage an existence together, …
It Chapter Two is a glorious mess. When the decision was made to split Stephen King’s It into two films, it seemed a sensible choice. The novel is over 1,100 pages long, and even the space of two lengthy films couldn’t possibly cover everything. King’s novel not only dives into the characters of the Loser’s Club …
If it is indeed true that Quentin Tarantino is going to retire after his tenth film (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, for all intents and purposes, is supposed to be his ninth), he could be dangerously close to proving the old adage that it is better to burn out than to fade away. Not …
Stuber feels almost revolutionary in a summer where every film seems to have earth-shattering stakes and where the simple pleasures of a good belly laugh and solid chemistry between actors happy to be there seem like the movie staples of a bygone era. To whip out an old critic’s cliché, they really don’t make them …
It’s difficult not to compare Ari Aster’s Midsommar to his previous film, Hereditary; in both, Aster uses grief as an entry point into explorations of horror and despair. In the case of Midsommar, that grief hits directly and quickly as Dani (Florence Pugh) is given some devastating news that destroys her world as she knows it. Her …