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The spirit of Samuel Beckett is alive and well in what will surely — and most deservedly — be the biggest family movie of the year. Beautifully rendered and tightly scripted, Toy Story 5 a very modern comedy that hits almost all its satirical targets…

“This is my last time here, so let’s have a party tonight,” Rod Stewart said Wednesday night to an ecstatic Hollywood Bowl crowd of 17,500, prompting some immediate groans. Fans didn’t want the show to end at the Los Angeles stop for Stewart’s latest “One Last Time” farewell tour, and either…

Rose is a neurodivergent middle schooler living in a rural town with Wesley, a single father just barely hanging on but trying to do everything he can to raise her alone. He told her at a very young age that her mother abandoned the family, but that…

Reality TV does not have an enviable track record of transferring small-screen success to the big screen. In 2003 the American Idol extension From Justin to Kelly, pairing the first Idol finalists Justin Guarini and Kelly Clarkson in a romantic teen…

The half hour or so first act of Michael Sarnoski’s surprising new film The Death of Robin Hood basically makes Game of Thrones look like child’s play. In full widescreen dark hellish color palettes we are taken to the Celtic fringe of 1247 AD, where…

In Memoriam, which just had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival this week, has a very funny premise. An egotistical, rather neurotic actor finds out he is dying and has only one goal left in life: to make sure he is included on the Oscars’ “In…

On its surface, Steven Spielberg’s masterfully crafted new film Disclosure Day might be classified most easily as a 1970s-style thriller in the vein of Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford or The Parallax View with Warren Beatty, in which…

"Kinks are eroticized fears," says author Dan Savage in the fascinating documentary Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders, which takes a brutal murder as its starting point and goes on to paint a portrait of pre-AIDS New York, with the filming of William…

Like it did for many people, the pandemic changed things for writer/director Drake Doremus, whose last film, 2019’s Endings, Beginnings, now seems like a prophetic title for the filmmaker, a true romantic, who has since ended one relationship and then met a woman to begin another as his wife. That…

Writer-director Michael Gallagher, another filmmaker who got his start on YouTube with millions of followers for shows like TotallySketch, has always been a bit obsessed with the infamous Heaven’s Gate 1997 mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, CA, right…

No doubt Jennifer Lopez currently is queen of the failing rom-com genre, a once-vibrant Hollywood staple that studios sadly relegated mostly to streaming in recent times. Of course there have been exceptions that made a splash in theaters, notably…

With the boom in horror movies bigger than ever it seems only natural Paramount and Miramax would try to revive the money-printing Scary Movie franchise last seen in 2013 with the fifth installment and having collectively grossed nearly $900 million worldwide over five films. With Paramount riding…