No matter what life throws at you, it's always nice to know you can escape into the dark. Especially when they're great, even when they're bad ... they're the movies, after all.
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☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Among the many seemingly impossible tasks accomplished by the remarkable documentary Boorman and the Devil is its refusal to turn 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic into a good film that has been unfairly maligned. Instead, it examines how intelligent, talented, dedicated people created a disaster. If you watch Exorcist II after seeing this film, you'll still watch an incomprehensible mess.…
☆ ☆½ The End of Oak Street tries so hard to be an Amblin/Steven Spielberg film from the 1980s that it's almost lovable in its earnestness. It wants so very, very badly to be a movie like the kind Spielberg directed and produced, a movie where unbelievable and sometimes terrible things happen to a family that lives on a happy, peaceful street in a happy, peaceful suburb somewhere in the United…
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ The same rule applies to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey as to every other film ever made: Is it a good story? Does it hold your attention and excite your senses and show you something that moves you, whether big or small? Because if it does, then how it's made is irrelevant. Cinerama Holiday might be a fun novelty, but it fails as a movie. Comin' at Ya! may have shown off 3-D but it was a…
Not many films have been endlessly analyzed and examined as Roman Polanski's Chinatown . It would be foolish for me to try to add anything to the academic and artistic discussion of the movie. All I can do to explain why it's such a favorite is to try to share why it works on me so well, why it feels as urgent and vibrant and new today as it must have 52 years ago. There's a scene in Chinatown…
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ There isn't a moment in Olivia Wilde's The Invite that feels false. I haven't seen The People Upstairs , the 2020 movie on which Rashida Jones and Will McCormack based their screenplay for this film, but as an exploration of a specific kind of American mores, values and stressors, The Invite feels wholly new, alive and relevant. It's also very, very funny. The first thing a comedy like…
☆ ☆ ☆ ½ Leviticus continues the 2026 horror-movie trend of positing the notion that the greatest horror in the world isn't a monster or the devil or the physical world but rather ourselves and the way others respond to us. Like Obsession (a man's wish undoes him), Exit 8 (a man's inability to commit traps him) and Backrooms (a man gets lost in his own mind), Leviticus proceeds from the idea that a…
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ In the '50s there were nuclear-created monsters. In the '60s, the dread of other people. In the '70s there was the devil. The '80s had slasher movies. Every generation seems to have its own specific kind of horror film, so what does it say, I wonder, that audiences in the 2020s seem afraid of, well, themselves ? Earlier this year, the Japanese Exit 8 left a man stranded inside a Möbius…
☆ ☆ This is painful to see. Disclosure Day should be top-notch Steven Spielberg. This is, after all, the filmmaker who created Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial . This is the filmmaker who generated such a sense of awe in those films, not just for creatures from outer space, but for how human beings can't help but wonder if we are alone in the universe, and what…
☆ ☆ ½ If confession is good for the soul, I am about to make my soul better, because this is no small thing to admit: I have never seen an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race . Ever. Am I the only gay man who has not? Maybe so, and I'm not sure I'm proud of that. That means I probably missed a lot of the jokes in Stop! That! Train! , a movie in which RuPaul Charles plays the American president, a woman…
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆½ Weather forecasting isn't a subject that has lent itself to particularly memorable movies. There's Twister , sort of, and Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man. Temperature and barometric pressure both get some nice callouts in L.A. Story and Magnolia , underscoring L.A.'s fascination with meteorology. Now here is Pressure , a movie entirely about correctly forecasting the weather on one…
