Complaints about Disney's recent fondness for live-action remakes are nothing new—I've certainly made many of them on this website and quite a few others. But watching Marc Webb's SNOW WHITE, I was overcome with such a feeling of "what are we doing here?" that it feels like we may have reached the nadir of this frustrating trend.

While the film may have been plagued with controversy from the start because of a bunch of pissant right-wing man-babies upset that star…

There's something almost indescribably moving about Terrence Davies' THE LONG DAY CLOSES, a certain all-encoming melancholy that feels impossible to adequately describe. An autobiographical portrait of a young boy's experiences growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s, the film is a kind of patchwork quilt of memories, impressions, and emotions, filtered through its protagonist's abiding love of the cinema.

The film explores young Bud's realization of his sexuality, represented by the shirtless laborers and brick layers whose glistening muscles first…

Much has been made over the years about Wes Anderson's instantly recognizable style, some seeing it as a hindrance to his work's substance while others revel in its quirkiness. For his part, Anderson has doubled down on his singular affectations, and there's something I find incredibly irable about his dedication to being himself.

His latest film, THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME, makes excellent use of his immaculately composed style, following an unscrupulous businessman named Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) as he travels…

In the nearly 30 years since the release of the original MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE in 1996, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has saved the world from rogue nations, biological weapons, international crime syndicates, and nuclear annihilation. As the stakes have increased, so has Cruise's dedication to performing death-defying stunts, from base-jumping off cliffs to hanging on the sides of real airplanes to climbing the world's tallest building.

Cruise's love for this franchise and this character has resulted in some truly spectacular filmmaking…

I wanted to love this, but SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND mostly just feels like a lesser reworking of the 2nd film, which was already a significant step down from the original. Pamela Springsteen seems to have really settled into her role here, but Angela's character feels more muddled than ever, murdering a camper so she can steal her identity and wreak more havoc at a summer camp. Gone is any reference to gender or sexuality - Angela's oversized bra…

Iain Softley's adaptation of Henry James' THE WINGS OF THE DOVE is certainly beautiful, but it really needs to be messier and meaner to get at the heart of its tale of unrequited love, backstabbing, and casual cruelty among the Edwardian upper-class. Helena Bonham Carter is terrific as the ward of a wealthy aristocrat who falls in love with a man of lower social status she is forbidden to marry. Together, they launch a scheme for him to seduce a…

Feels like a kind of cultural nadir, a weird case of cinematic necrophilia where a conquering studio returns to the scene of the crime to fuck in the ashes of the corpse of their one-time rivals. The self-aware humor feels less meta and more smarmy, poking fun at itself in studio-sanctioned ways as the studio continues to mine its IP for all its worth. Of course fans loved this, they're getting roughly jerked off by it. But it's hard not…

Cecil B. DeMille is a fascinating filmmaker. He was, by all s, an arch-conservative, participating in anti-communist activities in Hollywood during the Red Scare era, and even lobbying against unions. Many of his films centered around Biblical stories, from the original BEN-HUR to SAMSON AND DELILAH to perhaps his most famous work, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Yet his films were also incredibly horny, often focusing on the sordid elements of these stories, and when there were none to be found, he…

Netflix's 2021 Fear Street trilogy was a welcome surprise. It was a fresh take on a nostalgic series of Young Adult horror novels from the 1990s that managed to capture their essence while exploring different styles of horror films from various decades.

Four years later, the streaming service has dipped back into the Fear Street well, directly adapting one of R.L. Stine's original novels, 1992's "The Prom Queen." The story follows a group of high school seniors who are candidates…

Comrade Pollyanna teaches the town about the power of collectivism and rescues it from the clutches of her oligarch aunt.

While I'm only half exaggerating, I adore this movie and its delectable cast of characters. It's just a bracing jolt of sunshine that never feels as cloying as its reputation might suggest. There's something incredibly inspiring, not just about Pollyanna's chipper outlook, but about its tale of workers realizing that together they have greater power than the few holding the…

No one is as surprised as I am that I didn't hate the new LILO & STITCH. Perhaps it's because I have no real nostalgia for the original (I think the early 2000s was a pretty dire time for Disney animation) or that I took my 5-year-old and had a perfectly pleasant time at the movies. Yet, despite my general distaste for Disney's new obsession with live-action remakes of their animated classics, I found LILO & STITCH to be a mostly adequate…

The FINAL DESTINATION franchise has been one of the most consistent horror franchises throughout its now six-film run. While the fourth film, THE FINAL DESTINATION (2009), made at the height of Hollywood's early 2000s 3D craze, was a notable misstep, this franchise has remained surprisingly solid, given the usual roller coaster ride of quality that's common in other long-lived horror series.

FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES arrives 14 years after the release of FINAL DESTINATION 5 in 2011. Rather than go the…