Shyamalan’s adaptation of Paul G. Tremblay’s novel takes liberties and then some. — After cratering with back-to-back commercial and critical failures (The Happening and The Last Airbender) and missing out in both regards with After Earth, M. Night Shyamalan made something of a comeback with The Visit (a not-quite return to form), Split (an ending worthy of his reputation), and Glass (a definite…

Anna Kendrick stars in Mary Nighy’s feature debut. — A specter haunts the title character of actor-turned-director Mary Nighy’s feature debut, Alice, Darling. He seemingly haunts Alice’s (Anna Kendrick) every waking moment and every fitful dream, a voice floating in her mind, judging her, criticizing her imperfections, and molding her in his own toxic image. …

Kyle Edward Ball’s debut horror entry meets, surpasses expectations — In the pre-Internet Before Times, network television, local radio stations, and analog (paper) newspapers offered the primary means of secondary, one-way communication. Only landlines, fixed and static by nature, offered two-way communication beyond face-to-face contact, leaving large gaps of time and space where family, friends, and acquaintances simply disappeared from…

Creepy killer robots can add a new name to the horror genre rolls — In writer-director Alex Garland’s 2014 science fiction-horror film, Ex Machina, a tech-bro billionaire entrepreneur/inventor, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), with delusions of grandeur, attempts to create the “perfect woman,” a self-aware, sentient simulacrum in a robotic body. As always with this particular thematically-driven sub-genre (e.g., “tampering with God’s work or biological/evolutionary…

Long-delayed Shrek-verse spinoff delights, amuses, thrills — The staggeringly mediocre Shrek franchise may be thankfully, mercifully dead and buried, moldering in the deep, dank basement of DreamWorks Animation Studios, but if we’ve learned anything over the last several decades, it’s that nothing, least of all a onetime profitable, studio-owned franchise, stays dead and buried for long, let…

Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith team-up for thrilling, stirring effort — Over the course of one night in March, Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness, Ali, Men in Black) hit the highest highs of his profession as an actor, winning a much-coveted Academy Award for King Richard, an authorized biopic of Richard Williams, the unconventional, unorthodox father if generational tennis stars…

Sarah Polley’s adaptation of a well-regarded novel burns with passionate intensity — “What follows is an act of female imagination.” — Title card, Women Talking (2022) Still in her mid-twenties, Sarah Polley shifted from appearing in front of the camera as a performer to writing, producing, and directing, beginning with a well-received character study, Away From Her, in 2006, a devastating adult…

Spielberg delivers one of his most personal, poignant films — In The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s (West Side Story, Bridge of Spies, Lincoln) semi-autobiographical portrait of a filmmaker as a young man, Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord), Spielberg’s semi-fictional analogue, ventures into the cavernous dark of of a New Jersey movie theater to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s Oscar winner, The Greatest…

The Menu skewers everything from our entitled elites to haute cuisine — Moments into The Menu, a scabrous social, political, and cultural satire directed by Mark Mylod (Succession, Shameless, Game of Thrones) from a Black List script credited to Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, a super-select clientele comprised of various members of our privileged, entitled elites, take a tour led by Elsa…