Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Sunny Sandler is sweet — and sunny — in theater-kid dramedy ‘Don’t Say Good Luck’
“She is gone, but she used to be mine,” go the words of Sara Bareilles’ poignant and powerful anthem from “Waitress,” the quintessential Broadway 11 o’clock number. For musical theater fans, the mere sound of those opening chords is enough to send tear ducts into overdrive. So when at the beginning of “Don’t Say Good […]
Movie Review: ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ is a Southern fried flick with too many ingredients
It turns out that the honey business isn’t as sweet as it sounds: In the new movie “The Rivals of Amziah King,” beekeepers steal from each other, poison rivals’ insects and rip folk off. “It’s not full of kind people,” the title character warns. “The Rivals of Amziah King” isn’t as sweet as it thinks […]
Movie Review: ‘One Night Only’ is a tease, but its stars score
“The Purge” for sex is the best way to describe the premise of “One Night Only” unless you prefer Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” for one-night stands. As the movie announces right away: The U.S. government has passed a mandate that premarital sex is illegal except for one night a year. For the past three years, […]
Movie Review: Olivia Wilde rules playful BDSM comedy ‘I Want Your Sex’
Erika Tracy, the artist and provocateur at the heart of “I Want Your Sex,” may be the most quotable fictional female executive since Miranda Priestly “that’s all-ed” her way into film history. Yes, sure, it is a little strange to compare a very buttoned-up character in a mass-audience, PG-13-rated movie with one in a very […]
Movie Review: Anthony Bourdain biopic ‘Tony’ is just an early nibble at a culinary giant
“Tony,” the Anthony Bourdain biopic, is a coming-of-age tale for a modern culinary giant. Set over just a summer, it’s also clearly an appetizer. And like all first courses, it leaves you with a nice first taste — but still hungry. Director and co-writer Matt Johnson has frustratingly taken liberties with a formative period in […]
Movie Review: In ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day,’ a lonely superhero grows up and looks inward
Are the ears playing tricks on us? Or does Tom Holland’s Peter Parker sound, at the beginning of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” like more of a native New Yorker than before? The cadence, the sort-of Queens accent — it’s striking, as we watch Peter chat on the phone with police captain Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) […]
Movie Review: In ’72 Hours,’ the bachelor party has an unlikely plus-one
As a movie about getting older and still having to cater to younger demographics, the Kevin Hart comedy “72 Hours” has a meta synergy to it. Hart plays a successful New York ad executive named Joe whose campaign ideas have turned dated. His bosses no longer think he can connect with Gen Z. To reacquaint […]
Movie Review: Pickleball is the star of the sports comedy ‘The Dink’
It’s the tennis establishment versus pickleball enthusiasts at an uptight club in “The Dink,” a kind of spiritual descendant of “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.” The story itself is very by the books: A once promising tennis prodigy learns to get over himself and his disdain for the “lesser sport.” In one version of the […]
Movie Review: In Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey,’ an ancient epic is reborn
Getting home, and turning back the clock, has long been at the root of Christopher Nolan’s films. The astronauts of “Interstellar” painstakingly lose 23 years in space travel, almost the same length of time Odysseus is away from home in “The Odyssey”: a decade fighting the Trojan War, a decade trying to return to Ithaca. […]
Movie Review: ‘Evil Dead Burn’ goes full brutality, without humor, artistry or verve
French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček vowed when he took charge of the sixth installment in the “Evil Dead” film series that it would be the most brutal. Mission accomplished, mon ami. Not the most artful or clever or scariest. Brutal. Vaniček has certainly delivered — a relentlessly violent, overlong, one-note, meandering grindhouse that lacks its predecessors’ […]