Writing about Knives Out without spoiling anything is nigh impossible. Many of the movie’s pleasures, themes, and political messages are wrapped up in its twists, making any meaningful dissection of…
Waves is the first non-horror film from writer/director Trey Edward Shults. His previous film was It Comes at Night, which is definitely a horror movie, and before that came Krisha,…
Did we really need another Mr. Rogers movie after last year’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the excellent documentary about the icon’s life and death? Of course we did, you…
Writer/director Noah Baumbach has made quite the career out of writing what he knows. One thing he knows is movies—both of his parents were celebrated film critics—and another thing is,…
Charlie’s Angels has a complicated history as feminist media, to say the least. A team of kickass women was certainly subversive in the 70s, but the show’s producers might’ve been…
Ford v Ferrari starts with someone driving a car (a reoccurring motif) while narration solemnly explains that life’s most important question is “who are you?” Kicking a racing movie into…
Martin Scorsese has something important on his mind. No, not Marvel movies; he’s made it clear that those are dangerously unimportant. It’s legacy. Scorsese’s career has long been inextricable from…
The Shining is an odd title for The Shining. In both Stephen King’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film, “shining” is shorthand for the psychic abilities possessed by Danny Torrance, the…
The Scottsdale International Film Festival, (SIFF) an annual 10-day event that connects audiences with award-winning cinema from around the globe, is celebrating featured performances that have been recognized by the Phoenix Film Critics…
The dumbest thing about Terminator: Dark Fate is the title, seeing as the franchise abandoned any semblance of fate after the first movie. The original Terminator limited its time travel…
Motherless Brooklyn is a 1999 novel that takes place in the 1999. The film rights were acquired in 2001, and now—after a nearly two-decade development—it’s a 2019 movie that takes…
I recently had the opportunity to talk with Thomasin McKenzie, a rising actress who starred in last year’s Leave No Trace and this year’s Jojo Rabbit, in addition to a…
