Pete Davidson is the neighborhood kid everyone hopes will get his act together, except that neighborhood is national TV, and “everyone” is literally everyone. His appeal reminds us of the lovable bullshitter in our family who’s always ready with a joke but can’t keep a job—only Davidson’s comedy is full of hard truths instead of […]
Love them or hate them, zombie stories remain popular because they represent the nagging fear that the problems we allow to persist will eventually overpower us. Zombies are husks, barely recognizable as humans, possessing our shape and our need to consume but lacking morality, symbols of our collective failure as a society. In the 52 […]
No one could have predicted the global pandemic of COVID-19 when production began on Jim Allison: Breakthrough, but its foundational message is so resonant that there might not be a more perfect time for it to reach audiences. Chronicling the life and scientific research of Nobel laureate and trailblazing immunologist James Allison, whose work with […]
The spread of COVID-19 across the globe has left no part of our lives untouched, not the least of which is our viewing habits. Streaming services have gone from content delivery platforms to public services as we discover that self-quarantining can result in lots of time to finally whittle down our watchlists. Everyone’s viewing needs […]
From the opening moments of The Invisible Man, writer-director Leigh Whannell sets the stakes for the journey to come. Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) is enacting an escape plan from her abusive boyfriend, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). His house is a shrine to his pathological need to control while giving the illusion of freedom: walls made entirely […]
The greatest horrors of the movie world are creatures pulled straight from our nightmares, abominations that mutate from our most irrational fears. It is cathartic and emotionally healthy to confront the monsters that scare us, in order to realize that they have no power over us. The monsters of the real world are far more […]
How wonderful it is to see a film about art that treats the creative process as an essential part of the human experience, free of the fetishization of suffering, or the detachment of genius worship. The narrative of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire centers on the relationship between a painter and her […]
There’s a funny kind of freedom that’s recently emerged in the DC Extended Universe. After a series of colossal failures, each one worse than the last, the powers that be decided not to cancel the whole project, but to bring in fresh blood with new ideas, then empowered them to do whatever the hell they […]
The Rhythm Section’s title refers to the parts of the body an assassin must keep steady in order to be most effective: heartbeat and breathing. Everything else is tactical and depends on the specifics of the situation, but those are what truly matter. And in this film, those are the only parts that are any […]
Despite its name, Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables is not a retelling of Victor Hugo’s famous novel. But there are many ways it closely resembles its namesake. Within the confines of a tight thriller and a runtime of less than two hours, Ly explores questions of justice, crime, redemption, rebellion, collective and individual responsibility, and the […]