Justin Humphreys

Director Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is a love letter to 1970s cinema. An avowed cinephile, Payne affectionately evokes the era’s character-driven and frequently dark films with this wry comedy-drama. Payne’s Sideways’ star Paul Giamatti delivers a rich, funny performance in the lead, helping The Holdovers stand out as one of 2023’s best American movies. Set […]

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is nearly three and a half hours long, but its length just means the great filmmaker did justice to this sweeping, fascinating story. Flower Moon moves like a long fuse tensely burning down to an inevitable explosion. It’s a hypnotic, gorgeous, grand work and Scorsese’s best in years. […]

Horror specialist Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench is essentially a rehash of the giant monster shenanigans in 2018’s The Meg. It is exactly what its trailer leads you to expect: The prehistoric megalodon shark is back—along with its kinfolk—and they wreak havoc and devour a lot of people. It’s the definition of a big, […]

Based on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus, writer/director Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer follows physicist Robert Oppenheimer as he develops and detonates the first atomic bomb, then spends his life regretting it. The subject is fascinating, but, despite Nolan’s visual razzle-dazzle, the film only works sporadically. The movie occurs mainly in […]

Director Lesley Chilcott’s three-part Netflix series Arnold has a subject so famous and ubiquitous that a first name is all the title requires. Arnold Schwarzenegger has lived an epic life, carving out his mythic existence with success in multiple arenas. In this series his biography is presented strictly by-the-numbers in a creatively unambitious documentary about […]