The hook for Jojo Rabbit, and the central focal point of the advertising campaign, is that there’s little German boy in 1944, Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), who like most ten-year-olds just wants to fit in and be admired, and in Germany in 1944, that means that Jojo wants more than anything to grow […]

The question of how to make a good biopic is one that’s been a particular fascination around these parts for a while, and long-time readers have heard my theory that, broadly speaking, there are full biographical movies that start in a person’s youth and end in their old age, and these are typically dull; and […]

Being the best Terminator film since Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 isn’t even a low bar to clear. It is a line painted on the ground. But I’m happy anyways that Terminator: Dark Fate is able to step across that line. It gets there largely by being the first time in four tries to […]

Countdown makes the deadliest mistake I can imagine a film making: it openly rips off a movie that’s already quite famous with its target audience, and proceeds to to an objectively, obviously worse job of the material the two have in common. In this case, it’s basically just a smartphone update to Final Destination: if […]

Bong Joon-ho has been a brand-name director among cinephiles since 2006’s monster movie-cum-domestic drama The Host, and South Korean cinema’s ongoing golden age has been around for even longer, at least as far back as 2002’s Oasis, directed by Lee Chang-dong. So there’s not really any sense in which Bong’s seventh feature, Parasite, is particularly […]

Hunting for Freudian symbolism in movies is, I think, almost never a rewarding pursuit, but sometimes you just have to admit when a film slaps you in the face with its enormous engorged cock. And so it is with The Lighthouse, whose titular location is a giant erection of white stone that is routinely framed […]