Devine’s character, Owen Browning, is a bank manager, despite being so cloddish and lacking in judgment or impulse control that it’s hard to imagine him being trusted to take a bag of garbage to the curb. His fiancee Parker (Nina Dobrev), is a yoga instructor everyone in Owen’s family inexplicably thinks is a stripper. She’s … Read more
Making her feature debut, Adele Lim takes bold risks in her raunchy road trip comedy “Joy Ride.” The movie walks a fine line between exploring heartfelt questions about belonging and outrageous jokes played for shock value. It’s as if Lim and fellow co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao saw the antics in Malcolm D. Lee’s … Read more
“The Red Door” is the fifth, and supposedly final, “Insidious” movie. And, with the caveat that you can never trust a horror franchise to end when it says it will end, it does deliver a reasonably satisfying wrap-up to the story of the Lambert family. They’ve been absent from “Insidious” since 2013, when Blumhouse pivoted … Read more
Handsomely stark scenes are often reduced to three or four lines of dialogue, including the eureka moment of how Ballard gets involved in the process. A work buddy asks him how many children he’s saved, so Ballard changes his line of work. Mira Sorvino, as Ballard’s wife Katherine, plays a character who is credited at … Read more
When last we saw Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, he was flying around in real planes thousands of feet in the air as part of that film’s incredible dogfight sequences. How could you possibly top that? You fly without a plane, of course. That brings us to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, … Read more
But the film from documentary Chris Smith (“Fyre,” “Operation Varsity Blues”) is a total blast, regardless of your level of fandom. On the most superficial level, it’s just a joy to relive this time of pop culture excess and sing along with these insanely catchy tunes. It’s hard to believe the duo was only around … Read more
At the airport, Ethan also crosses paths with a pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell), who gets stuck in the middle of all of this world-changing insanity, along with a few agents trying to hunt down the rogue Ethan and are played by a wonderfully exasperated Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis. A silent assassin, memorably … Read more
Christopher Miller’s hilarious whodunit is back with a new batch of all-star suspects and genres to explore. PLOT: Detective Danner returns to help Aniq and Zoë solve whodunnit by questioning family members, star-crossed lovers and business partners, and hearing each suspect’s retelling of the weekend, each with their own unique perspective and visual style. REVIEW: … Read more
So you think Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, a “fake” poem followed by an addled “annotation” that adds up to a sardonic yet tragic narrative, is some kind of triumph of modernism? Well, yeah, it is, but in Eco’s collection, there’s an 18th-century book by Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe called The Masterpiece of an Unknownwhich is … Read more
But back to the action/adventure stuff. Before he can put his retirement gift away, Indy is whisked off on an adventure with Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of Basil and goddaughter of Indy. It turns out that Basil became obsessed with the dial after their encounter with it a quarter-century ago, and Indy told … Read more