Movies

★★★½ After decades of waiting, fans of the Ghostbusters franchise have finally gotten a sequel in director Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Even though the focus is on a new set of ‘busters, fans of the original films still get enough nostalgia through characters and events to make this feel like a genuine continuation of the...

★★★ Clifford, the beloved big red dog, finally makes an appearance in a live action movie. Director Walt Becker delivers a predicable, yet necessary, adaptation of the classic Norman Bridwell children’s books, providing a little something for the whole family. Such a recognizable fictional character from many adults’ childhoods will conjure up feelings of nostalgia,...

★★★ Approximately thirty years before this film’s release, composer Jonathan Larson, played here by Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spiderman, The Social Network), created the smash-hit 90’s show Rent but died at 35 of an aortic failure, just before opening night, a tragic metaphor for the backstage heartbreak of musical theater. tick, tick…Boom! is Larson’s autobiographical...

★★★½ Red Notice, an action-comedy starring Gal Gadot, Dwayne Johnson, and Ryan Reynolds, is the latest Netflix original film. Written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (Skyscraper), the film gets off to a rocky start but coalesces into a surprisingly enjoyable tale. Nolan Booth (Reynolds) is the world’s second-best art thief. John Hartley (Johnson) is...

★★★★ The French Dispatch Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch leans inconceivably harder into the style that has become Anderson’s own. Viewers are thrown into a world of pastel and symmetry with a movie that is broken up into four parts. After the death of Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), the editor of the French Dispatch,...

★★★ Kristen Stewart gives a fierce performance in Spencer, directed by Pablo Larrain. And while it’s possible to admire the performance, one can at the same time come away feeling the fictionalized movie doesn’t significantly add to a story of a beautiful soul many of us already know in great detail. Larrain, notably, offered a...

★★★ Eternals, written and directed by Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) from a story by Ryan and Kaz Firpo, is the latest film in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It never loses pace, even at over 2 ½ hours long, but it falls short on development and digs some holes that never get filled. Ajak...

★★★ In A Mouthful of Air, writer/director Amy Koppelman (I Smile Back) adapts her 2003 novel of the same name to tell the story of new mom Julie, (Amanda Seyfried, Mamma Mia!), who unsuccessfully attempts to take her own life shortly before her child’s first birthday; she then strives to cope with negative thoughts and...

★★★ Writer/Director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver) teams up with screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917) to present the surrealistic horror/thriller, Last Night in Soho. The story is solid and interesting, but some issues with the script cause confusion that lessens the experience. Eloise “Ellie” Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), a young, slightly clairvoyant girl from the English countryside who...

★★½ In the animated film Ron’s Gone Wrong, Barney Pudowski (Jack Dylan Grazer, Luca) dreads recess since all his classmates have cool high-tech bots, which are walking, talking, digitally connected devices shaped like eggs and reminiscent of the character Wall-E. The bots are acclaimed by their creators as the “perfect companion” and a “whole new...