This Halloween season was always going to be different. In-person moviegoing fundamentally changes the way people watch movies, and few genres take advantage of the silent yet communal experience better than horror. The reactions to jump scares, the seemingly unbearable quiet that comes from waiting for the monster to show itself, the desire to yell at the screen when a character is doing something they shouldn’t — it’s all amplified with an audience. When you watch a horror movie at home, you have control over the environment. You can turn on the lights, you can pause the movie, and you…
Author: Steve Katz
Dystopian futures are a dime a dozen these days. Things are rough enough in the modern world, though perhaps that pessimism is what leads to so many creators imagining what will be left when the world as we know it ends. South African director Michael Matthews made his name with his well-regarded feature debut, “Five Fingers for Marseilles,” a film that confronted South African culture through the lens of a classic Western. For his first major studio effort, he’s bringing us “Love and Monsters,” a look at high school love through the lens of giant monster movies. By approaching the…
A new Sofia Coppola movie is almost always a reason to celebrate. We’re more than two decades into her career as a writer/director, which began with 1999’s “The Virgin Suicides,” with a slew of festival awards and multiple Oscar nominations (including one win) to her name. Over the years, she’s shown a penchant for using the same actors multiple times, having cast Kirsten Dunst in half of her features, Elle Fanning on two occasions, and even co-writing and directing Bill Murray’s Netflix Christmas special 12 years after “Lost in Translation.” It doesn’t come as a surprise, then, to see her…
It’s rather surprising that it took this long for someone to make a high-profile biopic about Gloria Steinem. The legendary journalist and activist of the feminist movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s is just the sort of person who would seem destined to get a big Oscar-worthy film with a celebrated actress signed on to bring her to life. What the Oscars will mean this year (if anything) remains to be seen, but all of the other pieces seem to be in place for writer/director Julie Taymor with “The Glorias,” a look at Steinem’s legacy through four periods…
I don’t think I could blame anyone for wanting some escapism during these tough times. A global pandemic requiring extended quarantining, the decimation of the global financial market and the deluge of unemployment that followed, the widespread wildfires burning down the West Coast and civil unrest gripping the nation would make even the heartiest person want to hide under a blanket and watch something happy and uplifting. Of course, director Antonio Campos (“Christine”) couldn’t have known this would be the environment into which he would be releasing “The Devil All the Time.” Adapted from Donald Ray Pollock’s book of the…
Meaning is a slippery subject in Charlie Kaufman’s new film, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” Indeed, those are the first words of the film, spoken in voiceover by a young woman played by Jessie Buckley as she waits for her new boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons), to pick her up for a trip out to his parents’ farmhouse. You think for a second that she’s talking about taking her life. You later believe that she’s talking about this doomed relationship she finds herself in. And further still, as the reality of the film undulates and sloughs away in all different directions,…
It’s hard to imagine “The Invisible Man” would exist as it does today if Universal had managed to get its Dark Universe off the ground instead of crashing and burning so spectacularly. Before Alex Kurtzman’s “The Mummy” started and ended things with a whimper, “The Invisible Man” was meant to be part of the movie monster answer to the MCU, but things fell apart so quickly that it only took three years for a completely separate project under the Universal umbrella to be greenlit, shot and released without even the slightest hint of a reference to the failed franchise. In…
What a difference one movie makes. The first appearance of Harley Quinn on the big screen was in “Suicide Squad,” the nadir of Warner Bros. and DC Comics’ attempt to create a rival to the juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Suicide Squad” made money, but it was creatively and stylistically bankrupt. Despite this, plenty of people latched onto Margot Robbie and her performance as Ms. Quinn, giving DC the opportunity to spin her off into her own group of misfits, this time with a decidedly female flair to it. That female flair extends behind the camera as well…
Blake Lively needs you to know she’s taking this acting thing seriously. The “Gossip Girl” star’s film career has had its ups and downs, but in movies like “The Shallows” and “A Simple Favor,” she’s proven herself capable of carrying a film almost entirely on her own. Those performances were defined by her glamor, taking advantage of her height, her long, flowing hair and her supermodel looks. In her newest starring vehicle, “The Rhythm Section,” all of that is stripped away. Her hair is chopped down to a tousled, unkempt nest, and her skin is dirty and pock-marked, with giant…
Guy Ritchie seems to be returning to his roots. After making his name with gritty British gangster movies like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch” before graduating to big blockbusters via his take on Sherlock Holmes, Ritchie is poised to return to the criminal underworld with his newest feature, “The Gentlemen.” Boasting a pretty serious cast that includes Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Grant, newly minted star Henry Golding and Colin Farrell, among others, the film looks to embody the fast-talking scripts and stylish editing that made him a household name in the first place. But can he recapture that…