20th Century Fox

I’ve rated Bohemian Rhapsody three stars for each reason you absolutely should see this movie: the performances, the surprisingly effective recontextualization of established Queen songs (as both a plus and a negative), and for being a perfectly serviceable introduction to the legend of Farrokh Bulsara, a.k.a. Freddie Mercury. Beyond this, there are serious problems with […]

Years ago, a friend would always end our Foosball games with something he called the G.E.C.P. – the “game-ending crowd pleaser.” With lots of ballyhoo and without fail, he’d sink the shot at impossible speed, the ball thunking into the goal with a louder resonance than the other goals. I was often on the receiving […]

What’s the most important thing to you when you’re in your early grade school years and you don’t quite fit in? The friend you find whose misfit level matches yours. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is a raucous and gleeful celebration of such friendships, no matter how dressed up in puerile juvenility this film […]

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children may be summed up by this simple statement: Tim Burton does Guillermo Del Toro. That notion alone is worth a trip to the cinema to catch this larger-than-life spectacle of fantasy, horror, and adventure, as the film blends the best of Burton’s whimsy found in Edward Scissorhands (to be […]

If you don’t know what a teabag is—and I don’t mean the Earl Grey kind—then “Deadpool” might not be for you. Marvel gives itself a full reach-around in this gloriously profane comic book adaptation, which stars Ryan Reynolds as bottom-feeding mercenary Wade Wilson, and director Tim Miller wildly overcompensates for the watered-down version of the character we […]

Another tour de force from Alejandro González Iñárritu, “The Revenant” couldn’t be further from last year’s quizzical “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”), even if Michael Keaton himself were to sashay onto the screen in his underpants. Returning DP Emmanuel Lubezki once again displays his mastery of the protracted sequence, but this time around […]