Movie Reviews

Opening Friday, December 4 in theaters, virtual theaters, digital download, and On Demand. Every now and again, a movie comes along which hits you in a place that makes you feel like you haven’t lived up to your brain’s full potential. A movie that relishes in smarts without being too smart as to be inaccessible. It’s […]

The conceit of Getting to Know You is readily familiar, where strangers pretend to be spouses and genuine feelings get in the way of their playacting. However, writer/director Joan Carr-Wiggin admirably steers it away from the cliché and the used, guiding the film to better places where things don’t work out the way we want […]

What the hell happened to Andrzej Bartkowiak, the legendary cinematographer behind Speed and films helmed by the likes of Sidney Lumet and Joel Schumacher, and director of guilty pleasures Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 The Grave? His new film, Dead Reckoning, is an absolute dud, awash in superficial tension and a severe lack of […]

Picture it: Santa Claus as a real, working-class man with his wife, elves, sleigh, and the mission to deliver toys to all the good children and coal to all the bad ones. And then picture a smarmy, overentitled turd of a kid who resorts to near murder when he doesn’t win Best in Show at […]

Please note: This essay was written after seeing an English-dubbed version. I abhor dubbing, but it did not blunt the effect the film had on me. At first glance, the Russian horror film Sleepless Beauty seems like a knockoff mashup of Saw and Untraceable, where a single participant is bound in a room and forced […]

It pains me to no end that writing/directing duo Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson aren’t more well-known throughout the cinematic landscape. Their films are massively creative and imaginative, defying low budgets, limited locations, or a perceived lack of big-name stars. From Resolution to Spring to The Endless (with a stopover in the anthology film V/H/S: […]