Movie Reviews

When last we saw Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow he was, I don’t know, doing pirate stuff probably? After the first Pirates of the Caribbean, 2003’s The Curse of the Black Pearl, all these movies began to blend together. Some sword fights, a mystical MacGuffin, an all-powerfu…

The title of Alien: Covenant directly refers to the spaceship carrying the film’s human characters, and indirectly refers to the film’s most pervasive theme: The tense relationship between gods and their creations. Students of the Old Testament learn about God’s covenant with Ab…

The last King Arthur movie from 2004, the one directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley, made just $52 million domestically against a $120 million budget, numbers that don’t exactly suggest a hungry audience clamoring for more Arthurian content. But not even a marg…

In the second act of The Circle (a film so poorly structured that it feels like it has five acts instead of three), Emma Watson’s painfully earnest protagonist Mae Holland decides to go “transparent” and have her entire life live-streamed around the clock, save for the occasiona…

The only thing better than watching people eat delicious food in gorgeous locations – besides actually eating it yourself – is watching two comedians do it. Michael Winterbottom launched what would become a beloved trilogy back in 2010 with The Trip, which began as a BBC Television min…

In the final scene of Guardians of the Galaxy, Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord asked Zoe Saldana’s Gamora what they should do next. “Something good, something bad?” he wonders, before settling on “a bit of both.”

I’ve already heard one colleague refer to Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, in which an arms deal goes wrong and escalates into an almost 90-minute-long shootout, as a kind of cinematic high-wire act. But high-wire acts don’t last 90 minutes; watching somebody balance on a wire for 90 m…

In The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment in the car-jacking, street racing franchise, Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto does the worst thing a man of his values can do: He turns his back on family. That six letter, three syllable mantra is the sentimental thread that holds the Fast and Furio…

Less than 100 years ago, there were still uncharted areas of this planet. In an age of cell phones, satellite images, and instantaneous access to the totality of human information, it can be difficult to envision such an era — at least until a film like The Lost City of Z brings it to vivid l…

Joe Swanberg’s filmography is a fascinating evolutionary timeline; with each new film, the former mumblecore pioneer (and occasional agitator) has showcased increasing maturity. Win It All is his most grown-up film to date — despite the fact that it centers on the all-too-familiar man-…