Writer/director Leigh Whannell will be the first to admit that the Invisible Man has never been the most frightening creature in the storied canon of Universal monster movies. “He’s kind of like tier two,” Whannell told us at the recent press junket for this month’s The Invisible Man, his new take on the classic…

The condemned: Snatchers (2019)

Just about every Pixar movie transports audiences to a shiny new world of wonder: the depths of the ocean, the deepest reaches of space, the inside of the human brain. But the key to the studio’s enduring popularity may be the way it tethers those meticulously crafted backdrops to stories of relatable emotion and…

Brahms, the murderous doll with the angelic porcelain face, is not yet a horror icon on par with Freddy, Jason, or even that indecorous Annabelle. But Brahms: The Boy II makes a half-valiant, half-misguided attempt to continue the legacy of The Boy, a minor hit from four years ago, which involves addressing (or, for…

George Lucas did not invent franchise filmmaking. The first movie sequel, The Fall Of A Nation, came out way back in 1917. King Kong had a sequel. Dracula and Frankensten had a ton of them. Billy Jack, the first sequel to The Born Losers, was the biggest hit of 1971. A few years before Lucas masterminded The Empire…

How’s this for a cinematic recipe: Take two parts ultraviolence and witty, pop-culture-laden dialogue a lá Tarantino, add a generous dollop of Sam Raimi-esque gonzo Looney Tunes attitude, and mix it all up in a blender made in Russia until it’s hard as nails and infinitely more colorful. That’s about what you can…

Every once in a while, someone gets lucky right out the gate. But most actors begin their careers doing time in throwaway B-movies and misbegotten programmers. The Night Clerk, for example, must have looked like a great opportunity for a pre-Knives Out Ana de Armas, who only had one big role under her belt—the…

In Las Pildoras De Mi Novio, Jane The Virgin’s Jaime Camil plays Hank, a seemingly perfect mattress store owner with a deeply complicated pharmaceutical secret. Sandra Echeverria’s Jess falls head over heels for Hank and their whirlwind romance quickly escalates into Hank attending a very important company retreat…

A thought enters one’s head about forty minutes into Dee Rees’ Joan Didion adaptation The Last Thing He Wanted: This movie, this assemblage of scenes and disappearing plotlines and characters in different kinds of mid-Reagan-era attire, is supposed to be a thriller. In fact, the film has already offered up…

No one could ever confuse one of the stripped-bare dramas of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for a James Bond movie. That’d be like wandering into a small country chapel and thinking it a megachurch. Yet for all their celebrated austerity— the absence of music, the stark simplicity of the plots—films like L’Enfant, The…

The effect that Pedro Costa’s 2006 film Colossal Youth had on those who were lucky enough to discover it early would be hard to imagine today. The Portuguese director was then obscure but not totally unknown; he had been honing his creative voice since the late 1980s, with each new feature representing a major step…

Characters who impersonate religious figures tend to be a source of comedy—think of Whoopi Goldberg posing as a nun in Sister Act, or Robert De Niro and Sean Penn mugging up a storm as fake priests in We’re No Angels. There’s nothing amusing at all, however, about Corpus Christi, Poland’s submission to this year’s…

A big draw of the original Fantasy Island series was seeing who would step off the charter plane at the beginning of each week’s episode. To create a similar feeling for his 2020 horror movie remake, co-writer/director Jeff Wadlow and his team assembled an eclectic cast that includes The CW star Lucy Hale, beloved…

Dogs can’t act. Apologies to the many great “animal actors” of Hollywood, but they can’t. That’s okay—they have other skill sets, and it doesn’t take much to make watching a dog entertaining. Filmmakers have relied on well-trained pooches and careful editing to craft canine-centric narratives (the Lassie approach) or…

For the final novel published during her lifetime, Jane Austen set out to write “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Unlike the noble underdogs of Pride And Prejudice and Sense And Sensibility, Emma Woodhouse is a wealthy, entitled young woman whose problems are largely of her own making. “The real…

Lucy Hale can currently be seen living her high-fashion fantasy on The CW’s Katy Keene, but this weekend she’ll be living out a different kind of dark, twisted fantasy in the horror remake of Fantasy Island. In writer/director Jeff Wadlow’s tongue-in-cheek take on the beloved ABC series, Hale plays one of a handful of…

For this week’s second Film Club episode, A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife take a look at Downhill, the American remake of Ruben Östlund’s marital drama about a male ego in crisis, Force Majeure. Starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Downhill lacks the darkly comic bite of the original, opting instead for overt…

In its desperation to revive every scrap of dormant intellectual property, regardless of audience demand or interest, Hollywood has arrived at last to Fantasy Island. Maybe you remember Fantasy Island, though no one would blame you if you didn’t. Airing on ABC from 1977 until 1984, the Aaron Spelling TV series starred…

Welcome back to another episode of Film Club. Today, our critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife sit down to discuss Sonic The Hedgehog, Paramount’s completely unnecessary adaptation of the beloved 90s video game character. Sure, the redesigned visual effects are less horrifying, but they can’t save this movie from being a…

Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s Downhill tracks the slow-motion implosion of the relationship between vacationing parents Billie and Peter (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell), but their simmering spat has a snowball effect on those around them. Peter’s colleague Zach and his partner Rosie (Zach Woods and Zoe Chao,…