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Oscar-winner Hilary Swank (The Homesman, 2014) leads an all-star cast of wonderful performances as she plays a woman returning home to chilly Chicago to help take care of her mother battling dementia (played by a terrifically fragile Blythe Danner, Hearts Beat Loud, 2018). Swank's character also has to convince her staunch, bullheaded father (Robert Forster, London Has Fallen, 2016) to place her a...

Despite the fatigued title, director Quentin Tarantino's (The Hateful Eight, 2015) 9th, full-length, mainstream film is an interesting and fond revisiting of 1960s California and a strange interpretation on a historical tragedy.

Can you feel the love tonight? I mostly felt a fondness for vividly rendered African landscapes mixed with a teaspoon of nostalgia. Simba the lion is back in this live-action remake of the 1994 smash animated Disney film about growing up, death, destiny, and avenging your family.

First of all, let me just say I saw the latest Marvel superhero movie Spiderman: Far From Home. It was fun, but the formula is getting painfully familiar and predictable. Thankfully, I watched another film this week: The Guilty which offers a story that is absorbing, inventive, and unpredictable.

Up and coming director Ari Aster did a somewhat satisfactory job with his first full-length film, Hereditary, from 2018. So his second film Midsommar had promise to be a more succinct and less jumbled horror film about grief, family skeletons, and desperate measures. But instead of getting a delicious compact slice of cake, Midsommar turned out to be a 3-day-old, half-eaten Twinkie plucked out of...

After an unexplained blackout sweeps the entire planet for 12 seconds, a belabored singer/songwriter in England (an awkward but relaxed Himesh Patel, Eastenders, 2007-2016) slowly discovers he's the only person alive who remembers The Beatles.

You know that feeling you get when you take your first bite of a delicious slice of pizza or your first gulp of an invigorating cocktail and you think, "I'm going to remember this"? That's how I felt after watching this film.

Dark Phoenix is a prequel in the series of X-Men superhero films that started in 2000 with the first movie titled X-Men. With this being the 10th film in the series, it's a strong reminder that not all chapters are good ones and not all entries in a saga are winners (much like my sex life).

I'm happy to say this film is more than a concert from the past or a frivolous musical review. British director Dexter Fletcher (Eddie the Eagle, 2015) nicely blends reality and fantasy in this story of Elton John's formative years.

I have seen the funniest film of 2019 so far. Actress Olivia Wilde (TRON: Legacy, 2010) makes her full-length feature directorial debut with a teen comedy that is a loud, irreverent, zippy whirlwind of friendship, alcohol, condom water balloons, and the elusive goal of having fun.

Diane Keaton (Morning Glory, 2010) plays a single retiree who begrudgingly moves out of her New York City apartment and into a retirement community in Georgia for active seniors. To capture some of her lost youth, and to annoy some of the established leaders of the well-groomed retirement community, she starts a cheerleading squad with some of her fellow female retirees. After enduring awkward reh...

Journey's End is set almost entirely in a muddy, candle-lit trench in chilly northern France during World War I, and it explores the relationships and responsibilities of the British soldiers living in it. Based on a 1928 play by English playwright R.C. Sherriff, Journey's End was first adapted into a film in 1930 and has been adapted a few other times into films with different titles.

Comedy film director Jonathan Levine (50/50, 2011) manages to nicely mix raunchy humor, awkward attraction, and watered-down political ambition. Established comedic actor Seth Rogen (The Disaster Artist, 2017) plays an over-zealous political journalist who quits his job and finds himself recruited by the U.S. Secretary of State (a noble Charlize Theron, Atomic Blonde, 2017) as a speechwriter. But...

With a running time of over 3 hours, I thought I might need a colostomy bag to get through this film. But like many Marvel superhero films, it's a long ride but an entertaining one.

While watching this movie I started to get hungry since I hadn't yet eaten dinner. And my thoughts about what I might eat after this movie were more interesting to me than the movie I was watching.

While watching this movie, I was not enveloped in the story as much as I was wondering why the producers of this film thought it was a good idea.

As part of Disney Film Studios' path to taking over the world this year, with numerous films scheduled for release in the coming months, Dumbo is the studio's first mediocre step in this path for 2019.

When an ordinary family of 4 takes a summer vacation together at a peaceful lake house, their sun-filled fun is disrupted when another identical family of 4 starts terrorizing them. How can this ordinary family fight against real people who look exactly like them, move like them, and think like them? This tale of bloody survival takes viewers to a dark hall of mirrors, an eerily empty beach, and a...

Captive State takes us to a Chicago far into the future when Earth is under the occupation of a mysterious, and dominant, alien race. But instead of a future that is sexy, fast, or technologically advanced with lots of smooth glass and polished steel, this Chicago is dreary, dirty, dilapidated, and under constant surveillance.

I think I have seen the first film of 2019 that doesn't completely suck or disappoint. Brie Larson (Kong: Skull Island, 2017) plays Carol Danvers, a pilot for the U.S. Air Force who survives a strange explosion that infuses her body with super-human strength, flight, and fists of blazing heat. I don't know how the Marvel Cinematic Universe keeps doing it, but this film manages to be funny, excitin...

Twenty-two-year-old actress Chloe Grace Moretz (Hugo, 2011) plays a timid waitress in New York City who finds a forgotten purse on the subway. How convenient to find a woman's ID right inside the purse too!

Comedic actor and writer Stephen Merchant (Logan, 2017) has given us an unlikely story of family, courage, and wrestling.

This week's review focuses on the upcoming 91st annual Academy Awards honoring the best in film from 2018. Casey gives us his predictions in the main categories as well as his thoughts on films that were forgotten in the nomination process.

Flipping the script on a light-hearted romantic comedy has never felt so dismal or uninspired (much like my own personal love life). What Men Want is a remake of the 2000 comedy What Women Want when Mel Gibson (Daddy's Home Two, 2017) magically earns the power to hear all women's thoughts and even more magically becomes less of a misogynist in the process.

Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin TV series) plays a Mexican-American woman living in current-day Los Angeles whose innocence transforms into determined survival. After escaping an attack of bullets in a Tijuana nightclub, she's abducted by members of the Mexican drug cartel and forced to carry out their plans of drug trafficking and murder.