Blown cover: Disaster is in the details for Mortal Engines
If you’re not going to get a good movie for your money, you may as well get a lot of one. So it goes with Mortal Engines, a YA fantasy […]
Palace intrigue: Sex, humor, and elaborate costumes define The Favourite
The romantic costume drama gets an injection of style and attitude in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. By its description—period piece from the director of Dogtooth, wartime power struggles, a love […]
Getting van Gogh: Willem Dafoe and Julian Schnabel create a masterpiece
By its very nature, portraying the life of an artist of any medium on film while incorporating the substance of his work into the overall aesthetic is a risky endeavor. […]
Critic’s cut: Orson Welles’ last film is no afterthought
Viewed purely on its own, Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind is a masterpiece by one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, proving to us that even long after […]
Killer Queen: Rami Malek rocks Freddie Mercury biopic
It’s unfortunate that movies about exceptional people usually end up being so conventional. Queen was a band that defied expectations and broke down barriers, redefining what a rock band could […]
In a new documentary, UVA students and residents of a juvenile correctional facility connect through Russian literature
When the great classics of world literature were first being written, they were not meant for students or academics decades or centuries in the future. First and foremost, they were […]
Fresh blood: An all-new Halloween sheds the plague of sequels
We’ve had Halloween sequels for decades. What’s different this time? The same thing that’s different in found footage, possession movies, even the Amityville franchise: fresh blood, literally and figuratively. For […]
Mission control: First Man’s storyline falls out of step
As Janet Armstrong, Claire Foy exclaims, “You’re just boys playing with balsa wood models!” to the NASA scientists preventing her from listening to the direct feed of husband Neil’s (Ryan […]
Due diligence: The Wife is an intelligent look at love and conflict
There may be no better time for The Wife than this moment, in which the role of the male genius whose achievements came at the expense of unrecognized or exploited […]
Holy hell: The Nun sinks quickly into nonsense
Before we get to just how bad The Nun is, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the fact that it’s taken the so-called Conjuring Universe this long to deliver […]