Movie Film Reviews

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is bloated. Because the action spectacle and character study aspects of the story never meld into one,...

Mockingjay – Part 2 is flawed but satisfactory. The plot is convoluted, its climax is underwhelming, and the conclusion overstays its...

Mockingjay – Part 1 lacks spectacle and story, so it focuses on human feelings. While the sociopolitical aspects are compelling, the...

Catching Fire fleshes out the world-building, antagonist, and internal conflicts. However, it's also a retread without a conclusion. Like...

The Hunger Games combines sci-fi world-building, political commentary, and personal drama. While it has flaws (simplified conflicts,...

Panic Room is an exercise in suspense. It has a high concept, layered conflicts, setup/payoff, fair exposition, twists, defined...

The Killer covertly subverts the genre, work culture, and itself. The protagonist is a phony, its intensity is undermined by bureaucracy,...

The Marvels is messy. It has potentially good ideas, but is too overstuffed and disorganized to fully develop anything. There are...

Captain Marvel lacks personality and drama. While it shoehorns in platitudes to feign allyship, it doesn't earn those themes. Instead, it...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is dense, fusing a procedural mystery with a stylized character study. There are themes of...

Nyad is a standard sports drama with elevated performances. It contemplates the social structures that push older women aside and how...

Pain Hustlers loses sight of its messages. It includes pressing issues of corruption, addiction, classism, and exploitation, yet the...

Priscilla conveys deep conflict beneath the surface instead of unpacking those inner workings. It highlights universal interactions of...

The Holdovers avoids being derivative with sincere wit, heart, and detail. There's steady exposition, sharp dialogue, callbacks,...

More family drama than murder mystery, Anatomy of a Fall is intentionally ambiguous. It deals with grief, truth, perception, ego,...

The Silence of the Lambs combines potent thrills and insight. It has themes of transformation, objectification, identity, control,...

The Blair Witch Project is innovatively simplistic. Its hyper-grounded story is thin and repetitive, but makes the drama more immediate...

Beetlejuice is a clever role reversal, combining mundane bureaucracy with afterlife fantasy. This strange humanization allows for macabre...

Train to Busan elevates horror tropes with a relatable core. The prioritized emotions deliver nuanced characters, flaws, relationships,...

Five Nights at Freddy's is boring nothingness. The narrative is stretched extremely thin, belaboring a single protagonist flaw for the...