Review: Corbin Bernsen’s ‘Christian Mingle’
“Like a lot of reality television, ‘Christian Mingle’ is funny for hateful reasoning that displays damaging, scary facets of our culture.”
Vague Visages on Agnès Varda’s 88th: ‘The Gleaners & I’
“Varda’s sense of play, fun, silliness and humor comes from a collected bricolage of incident, travel and people.”
Review: Jason Bateman’s ‘The Family Fang’
“Bateman brings the full force of his directorial ability to the film, finding beauty in every camera placement and character movement.”
Review: Mike Flanagan’s ‘Hush’
“‘Hush’ has some very interesting moving parts in what amounts to an average film.”
Ebertfest 2016: Sound Some Opinions
Jacob Oller on His First Ebertfest
When Magic Was Real: Jean Cocteau’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’
“Cocteau’s magical realism, with flight and cursed beasts side-by-side with the economic woes of an importer-exporter, gives his fantastic elements gravity while letting the humanist tale of greed lilt like music.”
‘Southbound’ and the Anatomy of a Horror Anthology
“If the director’s approach to the material isn’t to your liking — say he’s too harsh to his characters or revels in gore for gore’s sake — a new direction, even within the confines of the broad horror genre, is just around the corner.”
The Allegory of Emotional Abuse in Tahmineh Milani’s ‘Two Women’
“From the safe, warm college campus scenarios that unfold in bathrooms, bus stops and classrooms, we see fringes of an increasingly conservative religious movement nipping at the edges of the screen.”
Review: Kirk Jones’ ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2’
“MBFGW2 is like going to a Greek restaurant and ordering a sleeve of unsalted saltines.”
Donald Trump, ‘London Has Fallen’ and the So-Bad-It’s-Good Candidacy
“A once-pure appreciation of misplaced passion, the hallmark of so-bad-it’s-good entertainment has been capitalistically leveraged.”
‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’: Empty Empowerment
“It’s not a bad movie, but no matter how long it spends in the war zone, it still feels like a tourist.”
Review: Robert Eggers’ ‘The Witch’
“The Witch does for the woods what Jaws did for the ocean. They’re ruined for you.”
Two Drink Minimum: ‘Hannibal Buress: Comedy Camisado’ (Netflix)
“Buress, typically non-confrontational, slips his subversive humor in slyly, a submarine beneath an inky sea.”
Review: Burr Steers’ ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’
“The morality and plot of the film, despite the hand-holding, are impossible to follow, as wars, balls, tea parties, schemes, and bizarrely combative discussions between sisters all feel as equally light and dreary as the next, like equal servings of spoiled plain yogurt.”
Review: Alessandro Carloni and Jennifer Yuh’s ‘Kung Fu Panda 3’
“The divine spirit of fools run deep within a film too relatively light and inconsequential to have too much staying power, but as an artistically rich Saturday morning puff piece, you could do far worse.”