Gene Hackman’s death at 95 years old earlier this year was something of a gut punch, and not merely for the terrible circumstances under which he and wife Betsy Arakawa passed away. Hackman had, of course, already retired from acting in 2004, and taken with him at that time not only his gravitas, individual talents…

Steven Soderbergh is one of the more interesting filmmakers working today, and in many respects also a fascinating career case study of the intersection of expectation and execution. With his high-level craftsmanship and workaholic propensities, Soderbergh lands somewhere between independent-minded auteur and perhaps the most talented, prized version of an old-fashioned, studio-system director working today….

Writer-director Kevin Smith burst onto the scene with 1994’s black-and-white comedy Clerks, a landmark in American independent filmmaking which chronicled the lives of a couple disgruntled New Jersey convenience store employees and the loafers who loitered outside their place of business. For a decade-plus, Smith then mined this particular seam, most often delivering different iterations…

Distributor A24, founded in 2012, has carved out an enviable niche as one of the leading American independent entertainment companies, on par with the sustained prosperity of Searchlight Pictures — but without any of the protections and benefits of that mini-majors corporate ownership, by first 20th Century Fox and now Disney. Everything Everywhere All At…

In 2022, Glen Powell co-starred in Top Gun: Maverick, a movie that hauled in a cool $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office, powered in part by IMAX format screenings that maximized the theatrical experience for film buffs, long starved by COVID and hungry for a return to pre-pandemic moviegoing normalcy. While not on par…

When you have a character say, “Logging is the deadliest profession in the world by a factor of 30,” a film is implicitly making a contract with the audience for at least one death by log, and the new action drama Clear Cut, co-starring Alec Baldwin and Stephen Dorff, at least obliges in that regard….

The internet will tell you plenty about the so-called “West Mesa Murders,” a series of killings in the southwestern United States in which the skeletal remains of 11 women (and one fetus), believed to be connected to a sex trafficking ring, were discovered in 2009. But what seemingly very easily could have been an interesting…

The phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” certainly applies to the world of entertainment, where featured and recurring players on hit television shows often find themselves the recipient of goodwill “skip-passes” that pull them out of the grind of Hollywood auditions and land them a series of plum offers, or even a lead role…

A moody portrait of early-twentysomething ambivalence, and navigating the free-floating jealousies and interpersonal uncertainties that frequently attach themselves to young adulthood, Chestnut serves as the latest crossover effort at carrying a movie by a young cast member of the zeitgeist-capturing Netflix sensation Stranger Things — in this case, Natalia Dyer. Earnest but unremarkable, the movie…

Introduced on Japanese television in 1966, Ultraman went on to not only become a hugely recognizable icon in its native land, but transcend borders and cultures, becoming an international pop culture phenomenon in his own right. It’s not hard to see why, given that the character is driven by a strong, unwavering sense of duty…