Christmas Blood is rather a bland title. Perhaps in translating from the native Norwegian — the snappier “Juleblod” — they could have jumped to the unused moniker of “Silent Night, Deadly Night”: “Slayride.” Reinert Kiil’s film is very much in the same ballpark as the 1984 seasonal “classic” (there aren’t that many slasher flicks where…
Horror auteur (“The Conjuring”) and box office money maker (“Furious 7”) James Wan takes a somewhat unexpected stab at the superhero genre with Aquaman. Starring the imposing, but beloved, Jason Momoa (“Conan the Barbarian”), scene stealing Amber Heard (“Machete Kills”), and a seasoned Willem Dafoe (“The Florida Project”), Wan’s installment to the successful (albeit it…
You don’t need to be rich or Asian to enjoy this film, but it helps if you are crazy. Unless you sneaked aboard NASA’s InSight Lander, you may have heard that John M. Chu’s (“Now You See Me 2”) satirical Crazy Rich Asians is the first Hollywood film since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club” to…
Maine spends the first ten minutes immersing the viewers in its setting. There is no dialogue, just the picturesque Appalachian Trail, the sound of the wind, and a woman (Laia Costa, “Victoria”) going about her business, which involves peeing in the bushes and fiddling about with sanitary products. The immersion in nature and its elements…
If extra-terrestrial visitors eventually show up on Earth’s doorstep in flying saucers powered by anti-gravity reactors and then announce they’ve been here before, Bob Lazar will have dibs on a very exasperated “I told you so!” That’s pretty much the chief takeaway from Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell’s cheapo documentary with the no-nonsense title Bob Lazar:…
When Sony announced its plans for a theatrical release of an animated Spider-Man film, even hardcore fans of the web swinger may have considered it to be just another unwarranted adaptation. “Haven’t we seen enough portrayals of Spider-Man?,” those with comic-book movie fatigue asked, and yet in his seventh major solo theatrical release since 2002,…
At a time when typical Hollywood fare consists of retreads and blockbusters aimed at mass markets, introspective and highly personal films have become increasingly rare. That alone is reason to celebrate Alfonso Cuarón’s (“Gravity”) Roma, an intimate journey that draws on the director’s memory of a childhood filled with domestic turmoil as well as a…
