As audiences screamed and jumped in the mostly silent screenings of “A Quiet Place” over the weekend, I found myself facing a pregnancy-related horror film of a different type. Leena Pendharkar’s 20 Weeks follows a young couple as they deal with an unplanned pregnancy and then subsequently with the baby having a physical disability and…
Steven Soderbergh’s reputation as an iconic filmmaker who has retired and unretired multiple times seems contradictory when watching one of his new movies, not merely because the movie exists, but also because his work feels like the product of someone who is always moving, always trying, always doing. Much of his focus in the past…
Hot off its debut at the South by Southwest Film Festival comes Wildling, a horror-drama that focuses on a young girl named Anna (Bel Powley, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”). Locked away in an isolated cabin since infancy, Anna only receives glimpses into the outside world through stories told by her Daddy (Brad Dourif,…
A part of the town of Edgartown, Massachusetts is a small island on the eastern end of Martha’s Vineyard known as Chappaquiddick. It’s famous because on July 18, 1969, a 1967 Oldsmobile carrying U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy (Jason Clarke, “Mudbound”), then 36, and Kennedy staffer Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara, “Megan Leavey”), 28, plunged…
Video game movies have sucked for decades, so when a kind of good one comes along, it arrives with the benefit of basement-dwelling expectations. This could be the explanation for why Roar Uthaug’s lean, lithe reboot Tomb Raider is so clearly silly and yet strangely satisfying at the same time. Or perhaps the movie works…
“Who are we if we can’t protect them?” Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt, “The Girl on the Train”) asks her husband Lee (John Krasinski, “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi”) in one of the only scenes in A Quiet Place in which dialogue can even be heard. The “them” Evelyn is referring to are her…
Miao Wang’s Maineland is a seemingly straight-forward documentary feature profiling Chinese students — members of the enormous wave of “parachute students” — competing to study abroad in the United States. Filmed over three years in both China and the U.S., the film follows two affluent and cosmopolitan teenagers as they settle into boarding school in…
