The Last Black Man in San Francisco, the Sundance hit from director Joe Talbot and star Jimmie Fails, is a poignant tale of a young black man searching for belonging in a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco. We recently sat down with Talbot and Fails (who crafted the story together) to talk about the film, and their…

Bloodthirsty plaything Chucky returns to cinemas next week in Child’s Play, this time taking the form of a crazed AI toy with the voice of Mark Hamill. Aubrey Plaza also stars as Karen Barclay, gives her son Andy, played by Gabriel Bateman, the doll for his birthday. In honor of the movie’s release next week, we had…

Unlikable characters. Bad decisions. Gloomy spaces. Throw them together and you have a recipe for an effective horror movie, at least of the kind that had its heyday in the 1980s, when audiences rooted for killers to butcher whole casts of teenage and twentysomething nuisances. If you’ve seen one of these films,…

For whatever reason, the America of 1964 was hungry for long, expansive, not-terribly-romantic musicals about tough, resourceful, charming London women. There had to be subplots about grease-covered working-class Cockney blokes with big charm and bigger accents. And these musicals had to puncture the…

Adam Sandler’s latest Netflix release, Murder Mystery, isn’t going to dispel the longstanding rumor that the Sandman mostly makes movies as an excuse to go on paid vacations, using his Happy Madison production shingle as a personal travel agency. Yes, the movie is set at an assortment of pricey European resort towns,…

God bless Glenn Danzig. He’s always been fully committed to his own idea of art, whether that’s been the full-steam-ahead punk rock of Misfits, the heavy metal of Danzig, or the extremity of his comic book company Verotik, a portmanteau of “violence” and “erotic.” But all of that has clearly been a prelude to his true…

You wouldn’t be wrong to wonder if Pixar was pushing its luck, cracking the toy box open again. After all, the studio, one of the last in Hollywood to truly deserve the designation of “dream factory,” already achieved something like the ideal conclusion to its flagship saga. Even those, like this cranky critic, who…

All of Andy’s Bonnie’s toys are back for a new adventure with Toy Story 4, another installment in Pixar’s decades-spanning franchise that follows the gang on an eye-opening road trip. The beloved animation studio invited us to sit down with the filmmakers behind the film—director Josh Cooley, and producers Mark…

Shaft. The name conjures up images of the classic blaxploitation hero, in a turtleneck and leather coat with jumbo lapels, walking along 42nd Street to the tune of the irresistible Isaac Hayes theme song: “Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?” “Shaft!” chime the back-up singers. “You’re …

Sienna Miller has spent much of her career embodying the “other woman” (Live By Night, Layer Cake) and put-upon wives (American Sniper, Foxcatcher, The Lost City Of Z). And she plays both in American Woman, a new drama from director Jake Scott and writer Brad Ingelsby. But this is still a meaty, transformative role…

Twelve years ago, the Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas fashioned a towering masterpiece from a simple tale of marital infidelity. Silent Light’s emotions were simple and universal, but Reygadas told its story via majestic images, and he chose a striking, unexpected milieu: Mexico’s Mennonite community (closely…

The Men In Black movies are about chemistry as much as they’re about aliens. Beginning with the gruff father/cocky son dynamic between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1997 original, the series has been powered largely by the interplay between its charismatic leads. Men In Black: International, the…

Miranda Bailey’s directorial debut Being Frank stars Jim Gaffigan as a father whose life is turned upside down when his son discovers he has another family. When we sat down to interview the cast about the movie, we thought it’d be fitting to play a game we call “Which famous family would you rather be a part of?”…

It takes all of five minutes for Jim Jarmusch’s new movie, the half-assed horror-comedy The Dead Don’t Die, to place a vast stretch of ironic distance between itself and its audience. The film’s eponymous theme song, a tongue-in-cheek country-western ditty by Sturgill Simpson, has just rolled over the opening credits.…

All of Andy’s Bonnie’s toys are back for a new adventure with Toy Story 4, another installment in Pixar’s beloved franchise that follows the gang on an eye-opening road trip. Ahead of the film’s release next week, we sat down with two Pixar veterans—production designer Bob Pauley and supervising technical director…

In 1975, Bob Dylan, who’d just started touring again following an eight-year hiatus (ostensibly precipitated by his infamous motorcycle accident), decided to put together something a bit unconventional. Rather than simply play concerts, he’d headline a “revue,” accompanied by a rotating group of fellow musicians (Joan…

Tom Skerritt has starred in some of the most iconic movies ever made—M*A*S*H, Alien, Steel Magnolias, Top Gun. He also won an Emmy in 1993 for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, playing the sheriff of a small town plagued with a variety of bizarre crimes in the acclaimed David E. Kelley show Picket Fences. The…

Today marks the 25th anniversary of one of the great action flicks of the 90s, Speed. In honor of the film’s anniversary, we sat down with Beth Grant—who plays the ill-fated Helen—to talk about filming her death scene, and why she’s actually kind of glad her character kicked the bucket.

The recent Netflix romantic comedy boom has emboldened both filmmakers and fans to embrace oft-disparaged elements of this oft-disrespected genre: the formulas, the heightened reality, the supposed frivolousness. While it’s neat to see a genre reclaim its own conventions from gendered criticism, the real trick to…

The future is uncertain for the X-Men, at least on the big screen. If estimates are to be believed, Dark Phoenix opened softer this weekend than any previous entry in the two-decade-old movie series, which began with X-Men in the summer of 2000 and may very well end here, depending on if that New Mutants film that…