2020’s

[9] With this re-telling of Dracula and Nosferatu, director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) re-solidifies his position as the most exciting artist working in cinema today. Eggers casts Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult as a Ellen and Thomas Hutter, a young couple living in 1838 Germany. Their lives are torn apart when Thomas, a real estate agent, is called upon to visit Transylvania where …

[9] One of the surest ways a film can win my heart is by letting me into the lives of characters aching for healing who achieve genuine, emotional human connection. It’s why I love films like Pump Up the Volume, The Breakfast Club, Sideways, or Little Miss Sunshine. Telling this kind of story convincingly and without too much sentimentality is an astonishingly difficult thing for …

[6] Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later) stars as the physicist credited with inventing the atomic bomb in this sprawling, rapid-paced, three-hour Best Picture Academy Award winner from director Christopher Nolan (Interstellar, Inception). The first hour of Oppenheimer focuses on the man’s life before the bomb, establishing him as a brilliant but difficult personality and a bit of a womanizer whose Left-leaning politics threaten to make …

[6] Writer/director James Cameron (Titanic, Aliens) returns to the world of Pandora thirteen years after the first Avatar film broke all box office records. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) now lives completely among the planet’s tall, blue natives – the Na’vi. He and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) are raising four children, including Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who has a mysterious, powerful connection to all life on Pandora. They’ve …

[5] In Croatia, a teenage girl (Gracija Filipovic) suffers her rigid, controlling father (Leon Lucev) until one of his old friends (Once Were Warriors‘ Cliff Curtis) visits and inspires her to seek a better life. At first, she tries to negotiate leaving Croatia with her father’s friend. But the girl’s plans soon unravel, with her father taking more desperate measures to keep her with the …

[6] Adam Driver stars as an astronaut from another world who crash-lands on Earth 65 million years ago. Along with a young girl (Ariana Greenblatt) who speaks another language, he must pass through a prehistoric valley full of dangers big and small to reach his escape pod before a massive asteroid collides with the planet — the very one that caused mass extinction of the …

[5] A teenaged underground cartoonist (Daniel Zolghadri) seeks the company of bizarre, questionable characters in the hopes it might inspire his work. He shuns his parents and moves in with a couple of middle-aged men who watch old cartoons in a sweltering basement together. He argues with a doting coworker (Miles Emanuel) at the comic book store, and tries to make a paranoid schizophrenic who …

[3] This review contains spoilers. The only thing worse than disliking a movie from the start is loving a movie, and then having the movie betray you in the end. Such a film is EO, a Polish film from veteran filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (Deep End) that we experience through the eyes of its title character, an adorable grey donkey who is tossed into a serendipitous …

[7] Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) stars in this posh, claustrophobic horror flick that pits bourgeoise guests at an elite dining establishment against the head chef (Ralph Fiennes), whose multi-course menu is designed for a sinister purpose. The plates begin somewhat confusing but interesting, but soon escalate with exposed secrets, exhibitionist suicide, and a promise from Fiennes that everyone will, in fact, be dead by the …

[4] M. Night Shyamalan, the once celebrated big-budget thriller maker of films like The Sixth Sense and Signs, has been relegated to low-budget horror movies for several years. I keep hoping that his budgetary confines will result in a burst of innovation, but that hasn’t happened yet. Knock at the Cabin is a small ensemble, one-location, claustrophobic thriller with a promising premise based on a …

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