If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China’s highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
Jane Got a Gun’s reputation precedes it, but it shouldn’t define it. After a tortured production that included the departure of original director Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and a revolving door of leading men, the Western arrives in theaters long after popular opinion declared…
There are worse ways for a television star to transition into film than a horror movie. There are also better movies to do it in than The Boy. Still, Lauren Cohan of The Walking Dead shines bright in William Brent Bell’s dim genre exercise, a vital presence opposite a lifeless…
Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity: the spontaneous “USA! USA!” chant that erupts after an out-of-his-mind Zac Efron announces to spring breakers that he’s just unknowingly smoked crack, or Aubrey Plaza commanding as foreplay that Robert De Niro, as the…
It’s hard to imagine a more unsettling setting for a horror movie than Aokigahara, the famed “suicide forest” of Japan to which scores of pilgrims travel every year to end their lives. At the edge of the woods — which, per Japanese mythology, are rife with demons — is a…
With found footage having long ago supplanted torture porn as the horror subgenre du jour, the prospect of a new Eli Roth movie might seem even more dubious than it was during the director’s heyday. The Green Inferno arrives in theaters two years after making the festival rounds and a…
If the Saw series taught us anything, it’s that every quasi-inventive genre movie is fated to become a yearly franchise with increasingly diminishing returns. The Purge practically cried out for this treatment from its premise alone: James DeMonaco’s film had a big idea — a near-future in which “any and…
Comedies about the battle of the sexes tend to have one clear loser: the audience. Driven by an oppositional view of romance that proved outmoded and seldom funny, Think Like a Man introduced us to six men living in Los Angeles and their corresponding flames. Some of these entanglements were…
Bounty Killer feels like the adaptation of a videogame that doesn’t exist. Inspired by the likes of Mad Max (movie) and Fallout (game), it tells of a desert dystopia in which soldiers of fortune are paid handsomely to knock off the corporate goons responsible for the world’s sad state, with…
The Iran Job: More Than an Underdog Sports Story
When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing 17 years later, was a noted…
28 Hotel Rooms Review: Lacks Emotional Context
A Late Quartet Movie Review: Leaves You Hanging, in a Good Way
Smashed Movie Review: Transcends the Drugs/Alcohol Genre
The Well-Digger’s Daughter Movie Review
Breathing Movie Review: Vaguely Sentimental and Coolly Detached
Why You Have to See The Master in 70mm
