Recent articles
February 21, 2026
Remembering Tom Noonan, Whose Performance in ‘Manhunter’ Is the Greatest Portrayal of a Psycho Killer in Movie History
Considering all the horror movies I’ve seen, I’m a pretty easy jump scare. I can sit through the degraded slasher-film trash of the week, and when that formula shock cut arrives, synced to a bombas...
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February 20, 2026
‘I Can Only Imagine 2’ Review: Now That He’s a Christian Rock Star, Bart Millard Has More Problems Than Ever. But Is He Only Imagining Them?
On the tour bus, Bart and his buddies, like the band manager, Brick (Trace Adkins), an aging biker with the voice of Sam Elliott, engage in a form of badinage I would characterize as bro Christiani...
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February 18, 2026
‘How to Make a Killing’ Review: Glen Powell Carries You Through a Screw-Loose Thriller of Money and Murder
It’s a light-fingered drop-dead screw-loose noir — a quasi-satirical mash-up of greed and desperation and Wall Street chicanery and a dash of romance, with Glen Powell, dishy in Brioni suits, turni...
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February 16, 2026
Remembering Robert Duvall, Whose Acting Brilliance Colored in the Light and Dark Sides of Humanity
When you think of the great actors (Brando, Streep, De Niro, Ullmann, Day-Lewis), one of the first qualities that leaps to mind is range. Robert Duvall, who died Sunday at 95 and was most assuredly...
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February 16, 2026
‘Joe’s College Road Trip’ Review: Tyler Perry Lets Out His Inner Bad Grandpa in a Hilariously Profane Buddy Comedy
Perry’s performance is a spectacular piece of high-wire burlesque. There’s an extraordinary spontaneity to it. The outrages just keep spilling of him, to the point that you realize this is Tyler Pe...
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February 15, 2026
The Epstein Files Have Become The Ultimate Disturbing Horror Movie. No Wonder We Can’t Look Away
In the last decade, I’ve occasionally written pieces that compared what’s happening in the world — specifically, in the Trump presidency — to something we’re used to seeing on the big screen. Eight...
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February 11, 2026
‘Crime 101’ Review: Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo Lead a Tip-Top Cast in a Jewel-Heist Thriller More About Character Than Crime
"Crime 101" includes crime aplenty, but at heart it’s a character study — or, rather, four character studies in one. Based on a novel by Don Winslow, the film is just moody and intricate enough to ...
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February 9, 2026
‘GOAT’ Review: A Go-for-Your-Dream Fairy Tale With a Bold New Animated Look and a Brashly Winning Attitude
It’s a highly original and rousing animated feature — a sports fable with a hip-hop vibe and an off-kilter cosmology. It doesn’t look or move like other animated features.
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February 7, 2026
‘Dracula’ Review: Caleb Landry Jones Is a Stylishly Fey Dracula — Gary Oldman Redux — in Luc Besson’s Otherwise Wan Potboiler
So here we are again, caught up in the never-ending slow-drip flood of cinematic Dracula mythology, now with Luc Besson’s wan, derivative, dutifully time-period-hopping, different-but-not-really-ne...
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January 28, 2026
‘Give Me the Ball!’ Review: Ferociously Entertaining Portrait of Billie Jean King as Athletic Superstar and Culture Hero
The movie is built around a freewheeling interview with King today, who unfurls the saga of her life. She’s 82 now, and the filmmakers frame her in a single head-on shot. She’s wearing fuchsia horn...
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January 27, 2026
‘Run Amok’ Review: A Drama About a School Shooting, and Therapizing It Through a Musical, Is Most Notable for the Performance of Alyssa Marvin
There are a number of scenes in which "Run Amok," the first feature written and directed by NB Mager (she based it on her 2023 Oscar-qualifying short), plays like the world’s most pious episode of ...
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January 26, 2026
‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’ Review: David Wain’s Antically Funny Satire of High-Concept Movies
"Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass" is a flagrant concoction that wants to do nothing more than make you laugh, and at that it succeeds. Yet in its way, there’s a bit of a vision to it. It’s...
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January 25, 2026
‘The Invite’ Review: Olivia Wilde Directs and Stars in a Bravura Dinner-Party Dramedy That’s like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Redone as Vintage Woody Allen
"The Invite" is marvelously entertaining, but part of the reason is that I think a lot of people are going to see themselves in this movie, which for all its wisecracking bravura is humane enough t...
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January 24, 2026
‘Buddy’ Review: In Casper Kelly’s Fairy-Tale Spoof of ‘Barney,’ the Cuddly Kids’ Mascot Is a Mad Slasher
The movie works, and has a handful of inspired touches, yet a little of it goes a long way.
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January 24, 2026
‘The Moment’ Review: Charli xcx Is a Version of Herself in a Mockumentary That Plays It Straight…But Should Have Played It Smarter
"The Moment" simply doesn’t parse, either as satire or as mock drama.
variety.com
January 23, 2026
‘Carousel’ Review: Chris Pine and Jenny Slate in a Painfully Languid Neorealist Drama of Lonely-Hearts Romance
Did I believe that Chris Pine, with his waxed and coiffed Beverly Hills look, is a sad-sack divorced physician who wears a stethoscope around his neck as he runs his quaint office as a general prac...
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January 22, 2026
‘The Last First: Winter K2’ Review: A Mountain-Climbing Documentary With More Tragedy Than Vertigo
"The Last First" is not a story of unabashed glory like those previous climb-every-mountain documentaries. Here the glory is threaded with human folly. During the 2020-2021 attempt to climb K2, a t...
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January 21, 2026
‘Mercy’ Review: Chris Pratt Finds a New Vibe in a Well-Executed Future-Shock Thriller About a Cop Placed on Trial by AI Judge
"Mercy," directed by Timur Bekmambetov ("Wanted") with a crisp short-attention-span gusto (the film has three editors, and you can see why), is like "Minority Report" meets "Memento" meets "Cops" m...
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January 9, 2026
‘Primate’ Review: A Pet Chimp Goes Ape in the First Simian-Next-Door Slasher Movie. It Gets Two-and-a-Half Bananas
It's a trash premise, but the film’s British director, Johannes Roberts ("47 Meters Down"), does something shrewd. He makes the chimp "real" rather than just another over-the-top fantasy-thriller m...
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January 8, 2026
‘Greenland: Migration’ Review: Gerard Butler Heads Up a ‘Greenland’ Sequel That’s a Dull Dystopian Slog
"Greenland: Migration" is one of the soggiest ideas of a sequel in memory. The first "Greenland" was an environmental disaster movie. The new one is a post-disaster movie. It should have been calle...
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January 6, 2026
‘I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not’ Review: Marina Zenovich’s Fascinating Doc Explores How Chevy Chase’s Dark Side Was the Flip Side of His Genius
Zenovich isn’t launching harangues against "cancel culture." She’s asking, in a far more ingenuous and exploratory way: What do we think about someone like Chevy Chase? How do we square his offscre...
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January 3, 2026
The People Who Say Timothée Chalamet’s ‘Marty Supreme’ Character Isn’t ‘Likable’ Sound Like Corrupt Studio Executives
Is the hero of “Marty Supreme” likable? I think he is, and for reasons that include the fact that he’s a scoundrel. (Has there ever been a likable scoundrel in movies? No! Not Once!) The number-one...
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December 30, 2025
The Best Documentaries of 2025
The way we see it, there’s a yin and yang to documentaries. They’ve always had the potential to be deadly serious — now maybe more than ever, as a world awash in chaos spotlights such topics as the...
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December 29, 2025
Brigitte Bardot Remembered: In ‘And God Created Woman’ and ‘Contempt,’ She Projected a Bold New Image of Feminine Identity and Erotic Power
It has always been easy to trivialize Brigitte Bardot. In 1957, starring in the movie that made her a global sensation, “And God Created Woman,” what she did was not widely regarded as accomplished...
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December 21, 2025
‘The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants’ Review: It’s SpongeBob on a Pirate Adventure, but With Most of the Joy Squeezed Out
It might be an exaggeration to say that "The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants" is the movie that finally squeegees the life out of SpongeBob SquarePants. But watching this friendly yet rathe...
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December 20, 2025
Have We Reached the Tipping Point Where Movies Could Stop Being Movies?
The first moment in my life when people began to talk about movies as if they could go away tomorrow was right after the pandemic struck. At that point, no one knew which end was up, but with Ameri...
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December 16, 2025
‘The Housemaid’ Review: Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried in a Twisted Domestic Thriller That’s Over-the-Top and Clever About It
"The Housemaid," a screw-tightening domestic thriller, is nothing more (or less) than a garishly fun and effective piece of postfeminist pulp. Directed by Paul Feig, from a script (by Rebecca Sonne...
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December 16, 2025
‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Review: The Story Is Fine, the Action Awesome, as the Third ‘Avatar’ Film Does New Variations on a No-Longer-New Vision
Cameron hasn’t lost his zesty storytelling brio, even if the story he tells is starting to feel like his version of the "Star Wars" prequels. As in: It’s fine, but do we actually care about it? Cam...
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December 6, 2025
‘Fackham Hall’ Review: A Spoof of the ‘Downton Abbey’ Genre Is Mildly Fun but Overly Civilized
"Fackham Hall," even when it features a drawing-room performance of a song entitled "I Went to the Palace With My Willie Hanging Out!" (and then a digitally scrambled shot of the piano player’s wil...
variety.com
December 5, 2025
Is Netflix Trying to Buy Warner Bros. or Kill It?
Why does Netflix want to buy Warner Bros.? In an era of mergers and megadeals, an age where content is king, a question like that might seem beyond naïve. As a newly, hugely bulked-up version of it...
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