Alex Garland's film Annihilation works best when taken as a gigantic metaphor for cancer. We're unpacking and explaining what the movie might mean.

I’ve been making Top 10 Films lists since 2002, and they’re really more for me than anyone else. They’re little snapshots of what I thought were the best films of the time, and then it’s fun to see how much I’ve changed or if the film has any…

The Tragedy of Macbeth is the first movie Joel Coen has directed without his brother Ethan, who chose not to be involved with this production. It would already be curious to see what a film would look like with only one-half of the filmmaking duo,…

In Spider-Man: No Way Home, MJ (Zendaya) has a maxim that basically goes like, “You should expect to be disappointed, that way you’re never disappointed.” For the young characters, who are looking to get into MIT, disappointment is the worst possible…

2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service was an unexpected delight. It was basically director Matthew Vaughnstealing the reins from the Bond franchise and making it his own with a mythology that clearly owed a lot to 007 while still having the freedom to…

In most of Guillermo del Toro movies, the “monsters” are misunderstood and it’s the humans who are the real beasts. While The Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth may haunt our dreams, the film’s villain is Captain Vidal. In The Shape of Water, The…

The Southeastern Film Critics Association (SEFCA) announced their award winners today, and the top prize went to Jane Campion's stunning western The Power of the Dog. Full disclosure: I'm also the President of SEFCA, and I can reveal that as a vote…

One of the reasons I loved Sean Baker’s previous film, The Florida Project, was how much empathy it had for impoverished Americans. By taking the viewpoint of a young girl who didn’t completely understand how dire her circumstances were, Baker was…

In 2018, I defended director Adam McKay’s mid-credits scene in Vice. In the scene teenage girls are disinterested in politics and more interested in the next Fast & Furious movie. While other moviegoers found this hypocritical and condescending from…

I was lucky enough to have a mom that showed me I Love Lucy as a kid. Even as a child in the 1980s, the show’s comedy works wonders. Lucille Ball was nothing short of a comic genius and the show’s writing set the bar for sitcoms for decades. So how…

[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for The Power of the Dog.] “When my father passed, I wanted nothing more than my mother’s happiness. For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her?” These are the…

How far is the distance between cruelty and kindness? On first glance, these concepts would seem to be polar opposites, but through the lens of Jane Campion’s stunning Western The Power of the Dog, we see that they’re frequently intertwined in a…

With her debut feature Wolf, writer-director Nathalie Biancheri crafts a powerful parable about trans identity, filtering it through a story about people who identify as a different species. In clumsy hands, the metaphor would fall apart and into the…

West Side Story is arguably one of the greatest musicals of all-time and easily one of the best movie musicals of all-time with the 1961 adaptation from Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins picking up ten Oscars including Best Picture. For mere mortals,…

Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who refuses to be nailed down, but I think it’s fair to say that he may be one of the funniest storytellers making movies today. His knack for comedy is unique and unusual given his caliber of acclaim and the…

I’m sure somewhere in House of Gucci, there’s a serious story about ambition and how the concept of a “family business” is an oxymoron, but then Jared Leto’s Paolo Gucci opens his mouth and out comes an accent that can only be described as “Italian”…

Jonathan Larson will forever be a young genius. He changed musical theater in his 30s with Rent, but tragically died before the show opened due to an aortic dissection. Instead of a long career filled with stunning work, we can only glimpse at…

Here’s why 1984’s Ghostbusters “works”: it’s a simple comic juxtaposition. You start with a big, outlandish premise—ghosts are real and they’re the forebearer of an apocalyptic event. In a straight sci-fi action movie, you would get a standard sci-fi…

Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), like most major animation studios, makes movies for families. Animated films are expensive, they take about 4-5 years to make, they need to appeal to a wide audience, and that means pulling in families. Doing…

As part of Disney+ Day, the studio rolled out a whole bunch of logos for its upcoming series including Secret Invasion. Production began on the series last month with Samuel L. Jackson set to star as Nick Fury alongside Ben Mendelsohn as Skrull…