The most jarring sight in James Gray's We Own the Night is that of a masked hitman calmly walking up to a policeman on a dark and quiet street and shooting him in the face. The burlap bag placed over the assassin's head is a simple but frightening disguise, a surprisingly inhuman-looking statement when we expected a ski mask that would at least let us see the human-shaped outline of his head. Visually, it's a great summary of the dingy, sickening quality of the violence in th

Perhaps it's hypocritical for a movie critic like me to look at the culture he lives in and call it cynical. My hypocrisy doesn't change the fact that today, we are endlessly inundated with think pieces about why someone we take for granted as a hero is actually the villain of their story. Arguments like these aren't limited to the hero-villain framework, either. Though his arguments were horrendously eisegetical, I once read an article in which a journalist tried to frame th

Maybe I'm a few years too old to appreciate the Scary Movie franchise. I hadn't seen any of them before I watched Scary Movie 2 with some friends last night, but by the time the credits were rolling, any plans I had to see the other ones had been dragged through the mud by what is easily one of the worst movies I've seen this year, if not ever. To some degree, I can understand that comedies are prone to divide audiences; humor is by its very nature subjective. Still, the targ

I like to walk into a movie with an open mind, but when the title alone sounds like a chatbot created it, we're already off on the wrong foot. As for The Lost Husband itself, it's a retread of already-unimpressive tropes repeated countless times over, and because it refuses to allow its characters to be anything more than a collection of well-worn cliches, it willingly limits itself to reminding us why Hallmark - which it's so obviously inspired by - became a household name a

Top Gun: Maverick both reinvigorates the nostalgia of the original movie and improves on it in every conceivable way. From the opening scenes set on an aircraft carrier and directly mirroring Tom Cruise's classic, to the many different references taped and pinned to Pete "Maverick" Mitchell's locker, to another shot of Cruise riding his motorcycle next to a jet flying down the runway, this is a relatively risk-averse sequel that mostly exists to remind us of all the things we

Winchester is one of the more irritating movies I've seen in the last year. It is a strawman argument dressed up as deep-thinking cinema, a movie too set in its ways to try and provoke anything beyond thoughtless agreement or vehement dissent. Worse, it has a holier-than-thou attitude that invades every corner and crevice of the story it's trying to tell. This is more than a bad movie: it is an arrogant Trojan horse that thinks it will save lives. Underpar filmmaking ironical

The best thing about director Ted Koland’s Best Man Down is that it’s short. That may sound like hyperbole, but I had a hard time finding one good thing to say about this movie. Even at a mere hour-and-twenty-nine minutes long, I was begging for it to be over so I could move on to something with a semblance of interest in its own story, or at least enough of it to succeed on some meager level. It is a drama without intimacy, a story without purpose, and worst of all, a comedy

An idealistic part of us likes to romanticize The Troubles, possibly the most volatile time in Ireland’s history. It’s easier to stomach a complicated power struggle when you’ve minimized it into a libertarian fever dream that free-market freaks like me can worship. Many movies have been made on the subject, Liam Neeson’s action-heavy, borderline-exploitative In The Land of Saints and Sinners being the first that springs to mind. However, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast completely

Between a sprinkling of unwieldy subplots, a smattering of underwhelming supporting villains, and some absolutely toe-curling attempts by George Lucas at Shakespearean melodrama, Revenge of the Sith is far from perfect. It is sometimes a showcase of Lucas's worst tendencies as a filmmaker, a movie where women are beautiful because they are in love, and people die for no other reason than that they lost the will to live. But unlike the other two movies in the prequel trilogy,

Jungleland is not really a boxing movie. It is a quiet interpersonal drama in which its characters happen to love boxing, and those hoping for or even expecting something Creed-flavored will probably be disappointed. However, more patient souls willing to invest in what it wants to do may just walk away pleased, because the spectacular performances and intense focus on these characters' relationships make it a genuinely respectable character drama. This movie is about Walter

Every now and again, it's good to watch a movie outside your comfort zone. That's why I'm going straight from reviewing Mortal Kombat II to writing about this, the first movie that came up when I used that recommend me a random movie tool. My brothers looked at me funny when I told them what I was watching, but while it isn't a movie I would have sought out on my own power, The Jane Austen Book Club is a personable drama that juggles many different parts and somehow makes the

Mortal Kombat II plays like what a little boy sees when he bangs his action figures together. Little boys are impressionable, and this movie is too, devotedly repeating every possible action and fantasy movie cliché while barreling through a lineup of fight scenes held together by one-liners and vaguely philosophical ramblings. Simon McQuoid’s first adaptation of the infamous video game franchise struggled to find an identity to call its own, and though an impressive leading

Weatherman Phil Connors is a terrible person who is allergic to fun. While the infectiously happy citizens of Punxsutawney celebrate Groundhog Day with joyous singing and dancing, Phil sneers at their festivities, bullies his camera crew, and revels in his narcissism in the deadpan way that only the most hardened egomaniac can. It's almost a stroke of divine punishment that a sudden blizzard hits and prevents him from leaving town. After a desperate search for a way out of th

If David Fincher's Se7en rubbed your face in the horrific machinations of a fictional serial killer, then Zodiac is an intentionally clinical examination of the search for a real one. The blood isn't splashed across the screen as liberally as in Fincher's earlier effort, nor are the shadows nearly as dark. This relative restraint gives this all-too-true story just that much more authenticity, and makes the investigation by police and amateurs alike into the mysterious Zodiac

When I tell you that Star Trek Beyond has more in common with Max and Ruby than it does with most other multi-million-dollar science fiction sequels, I'm only partially joking. It is technically a sequel, but its dubious-at-best connections to the previous movie continue a trend that is becoming a little tired. If your franchise film doesn't recognize what came before it and doesn't care about what comes after, why should we? This is where my Nick Jr comparison applies, and t

Star Trek Into Darkness almost contains enough over-the-top CGI to distract you from the fact that it's a good movie. If its 2009 predecessor sometimes straddled the line between science fiction and Iowa, this one looks a bit more like an MCU movie, one that often and regrettably does away with the grounded atmosphere that served parts of the prior film so well. And yet, even if the way it looks often lacks the spine of the original, Into Darkness makes up for this visual tep

The best thing about the first Greenland was its almost resigned acceptance that the end of the world is not fun. That's not a shot across the bow of 2012 and other movies like it, just a recognition that Gerard Butler and Co. approached the genre's subject matter with a sensitivity it's not usually afforded. It used people not as blood bags to be burst open for an audience's amusement, but as a medium to ask simple but forceful questions about what you would do in the face o

J.J. Abrams's first effort to reboot the Star Trek franchise reminds me of Transformers, and by some miracle, that's a compliment. This legacy sequel is at its best when marrying industrial futurism to grounded and humanist themes and a down-to-earth saloon or two, and it puts Michael Bay’s functionally similar but hopelessly childish wet dream to shame. I'll admit that it can sometimes be under-ambitious and hyperactive, but its likable cast and capable themes are the gas in

Though it's not hard to see that psychopathic killers aren't right in the head, something in us needs to rationalize their actions to avoid having to comprehend the depths the human mind can sink to. We want to know why these people are drawn to such horrible things as murder, sort of like why we step into the dark, scary room to see what’s there despite our fear of what – or who – could be lurking inside. This is a big reason why I think Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the L

The infamous Mortal Kombat series is no stranger to moral panic. In 1997, Andrea Wilson dragged her thirteen-year-old son, Yancy, and Midway Games into court after Yancy killed his brother with a kitchen knife and a move that the grief-stricken mother claimed was inspired by Cyrax, a character in the game. The court ended up ruling against Andrea, but this was only the crescendo of a wave of outrage over the series's spectacularly over-the-top violence, a wave that has plague