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J.K. Simmons knows how to do sociopath. There’s something so fascinating about a performer like Simmons who can pivot from a guy who looks like your average suburban neighbor to a total lunatic with a perfectly timed malevolent smile. He’s having a blast in most of “You Can’t Run Forever,” and the fact that it […]

“The Blue Angels,” a nonfiction film about the Navy’s flight demonstration team, was made for IMAX, in two senses of the phrase. First, technically: according to Cineworld’s website, “‘The Blue Angels’ was shot with Sony’s Venice 2 IMAX-certified digital cameras and features IMAX exclusive Expanded Aspect Ratio (EAR) throughout.” Second: it’s mainly, perhaps almost exclusively,

“Nightwatch,” the 1994 Danish thriller about a young psych ward attendant who gets stalked by a killer? There was an English language remake in 1997 with the same title and director (Ole Bornedal) and starring Ewan McGregor, Nick Nolte, and Patricia Arquette, among others. The Danish version was better, though even that was mostly charming

“IF,” you may be greeted with a short introduction by the writer/director, asserting that the film is expressly for all the “girl dads” out there. Having now seen it, that much is true: despite its family-friendly brief, “IF” is less for kids than for the adults of kids the girl dads, if you will who

“Nothing Can’t Be Undone By a Hotpot” is not only the best movie title of the year so far, but also a no-frills Chinese whodunit about a pile of stolen cash, a human body, and a long line of dirty laundry. The cash and the body present themselves early on in this sugary Agatha Christie-style

“Poolman,” is a character comedy about oddball Los Angelenos that doubles as a spoof of 1940s detective movies. Pine also cowrote (with Ian Gotler), co-produced, and plays the title character, Darren Barrenman. Darren is a big-bearded, long-haired, talkative, thoroughly goofy pool cleaner who lives in a tiny trailer right next to the pool that he

Police brutality is a subject that never seems to leave the news. There’s too many instances, too many stories from around the country pointing to a larger abuse of state-sanctioned power. Some headlines bubble up to national attention, even those that don’t will leave marks on the community where it happened. In “Power,” documentarian Yance

Letitia Wright gives a quietly powerful performance in “Aisha” as a young Nigerian woman seeking asylum in Ireland and struggling to overcome one bureaucratic obstacle after another. Writer-director Frank Berry’s film never devolves into melodrama–if anything, it may be understated to a fault–but he grounds her plight in an authentic mixture of daily frustrations and

One of the pleasures of being a critic is getting assigned to review a film you might not otherwise have seen. 2021’s “The Dry” was one of those, a taut moody drama/thriller based on Jane Harper’s best-selling novel (the first in a series). It starred Eric Bana as Melbourne cop Aaron Falk who returned to

Three people sit down to dinner at a remote cabin in the woods. Before they eat, they fold their hands and say grace. But they are not thanking God; they are thanking the cabin itself, which they have given the Biblical name of Lazareth, and which Lee (Ashley Judd) describes as their source of protection,