Drama

[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 …

[8] The Earthling is an odd, disconcerting sort of film that nevertheless casts a spell and is a bit hard to shake when it’s over. It stars William Holden (Sunset Boulevard) in his penultimate film performance, playing a terminally ill man who returns home to his native Australia to die alone in the vast wilderness. Once there, he lives off the land, sleeping in makeshift …

[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 …

[7] Jack Holt (San Francisco), Ralph Graves (Ladies of Leisure), and Fay Wray (King Kong) star in this early ‘talkie’ from director Frank Capra (It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). Holt and Graves play a dirigible (blimp) commander and Navy pilot, respectively, who set their sights on planting an American flag at the South Pole when a French explorer (Hobart Bosworth) offers …

[5] A young boy’s family is marked for death after the father is caught embezzling money from the mob. Before they are all killed, a tough-as-nails neighbor named Gloria, played by Gena Rowlands, reluctantly agrees to take custody of the boy. Gloria then becomes a cat and mouse chase movie throughout New York City as the mob attempts to find and kill both Gloria and …

[7] Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani star in this disturbing horror film from writer/director Andrzej Zulawski. Adjani’s character asks Neill’s for a divorce, but when Neill refuses to let her go, both of them descend into madness. Possession is part psychological thriller, part dark fantasy, eventually introducing threatening doppelgangers and a weird octopus monster that scores with Adjani. If you ask me what Possession means, …

[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 …

[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 …

[6] Japan’s Toho Pictures launched a third reboot of their Godzilla franchise with this 29th installment (not counting two American-made movies). Shin Godzilla follows various political figures and public agencies as they deal with the arrival of a giant creature that crawls out of the ocean and starts wreaking havoc across the land. It grows and evolves into the Godzilla we all recognize, only meaner …

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