Perhaps the most acclaimed film of the year comes from South Korea. It is a film which constantly surprises, and which gradually builds into something completely unpredictable. It is the type of film that Hollywood executives seem to fear because […]

Louisa May Alcott’s most famous tale has been filmed numerous times, often with great results — I gave the 1994 version four stars. This particular version jumps around in time, which I found rather distracting, but writer-director Greta Gerwig develops […]

I daresay nobody was more surprised that Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) was as good as it is than me; I didn’t like the original Jumanji (1995) very much, but the reboot was both visually exciting and dramatically sound […]

How many classic World War I films can you name? I’ll list a few — All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957) and 1917 (2019). I don’t count Wings (1927), The Blue Max (1966) or Zeppelin […]

This is another one of those crass, rude and lewd comedies which I do not care for very much. Its strongest asset is that it is female-centric, led by believable, empathetic female characters, with a story that eventually leads to […]

Claustrophobic horror films are usually fun, and you cannot get much more claustrophobic than six-and-a-half miles beneath the ocean’s surface, in the deepest area of the Pacific Ocean. This film is rather derivative, however, something along the lines of The […]

My friend Pete Jacelone has made what I consider to be his best movie yet, one which premiered last night at the Anthology Film Archive in New York City. It is his second of three planned serial killer outings; the […]

Yes, Cats is among the strangest films of this, or any other, year. Pretty much everything you’ve read about it (if, indeed, you have been reading about this particular cat-tastrophe) is true. And yet . . . I kind of […]

Whodunits with large groups of unlikable characters leave me rather cold, but writer-director Rian Johnson has found a way to sweeten the pot with some very clever plotting. The story is consistently surprising, beautifully edited and builds very strongly in […]