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There are actors we admire. There are characters we love. And every so often, there is a performance so definitive that actor and character become nearly inseparable in the cultural imagination. For generations of Star Trek fans, Sir Patrick Stewart was Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Of course, Stewart’s extraordinary career extended far beyond the bridge of the Enterprise. He gave us Professor Charles...

There are animated movies—and then there are movies that remind us animation is an art form. Wildwood is one of those movies. Laika’s latest stop-motion fantasy is enormous in scale, intricate in design, and at times almost overwhelming in its craftsmanship. It is a movie where you can practically feel the hands of the artists in every frame. And in that respect, Wildwood belongs to a much older t...

Some movies divide audiences because of politics. Others divide audiences because of style. And then there are movies like Street Fighter, which seem to divide audiences based on one deceptively simple question: What did you come to see? For longtime fans of the games, the new Street Fighter delivers many of the recognizable pleasures one might expect: familiar characters, costumes that echo the g...

Choose anOTHER movie. Every now and then, a horror movie introduces an idea so intriguing that you immediately begin imagining all the directions the filmmakers could take it. Other Mommy has one of those ideas. Based on Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, the story follows Bela, a young girl who develops a relationship with a sinister presence inside her home—an entity that looks uncannil...

Satire is a difficult balancing act. It can exaggerate. It can provoke. It can make audiences uncomfortable. But if it wants to say something meaningful about politics, culture, religion, corporate power, or social division, it still has to understand the people and ideas it is satirizing. That is where Digger lost me. The film takes aim at corporate greed, willful ignorance, religion, and the pol...

Survival movies usually pose a fairly straightforward question: will the characters make it out alive? But the best examples of the genre understand that physical survival may be only half the battle. Brad Pitt takes audiences deep into the Alaskan wilderness in Heart of the Beast, playing James Belmont, a retired Green Beret traveling with Odin, his former combat dog. After a devastating plane cr...

Sometimes a movie arrives with a premise so simple and so ridiculous that it sounds impossible to pull off. Wile E. Coyote, after decades of being crushed, blown up, launched from cliffs, and otherwise betrayed by Acme products, decides he has finally had enough. So he sues them. That is the wonderfully absurd setup of Coyote vs. Acme, a live-action and animated comedy that plays like Who Framed R...

For over 15 years, horror audiences have been returning to one particular location: the Further. And today, we are reviewing this most recent return in Insidious: Out of the Further, the sixth installment in the Insidious franchise. This franchise has always understood the importance of atmosphere. The red door, the astral plane, the unsettling creatures, and the performances—particularly Lin Shay...

Dinosaurs are scary again. That may be the simplest way to describe The End of Oak Street, a summertime creature feature that takes prehistoric predators and drops them into one of the most familiar environments imaginable: suburbia. Shot on 35mm film, the movie has a wonderfully warm, slightly soft texture that gives the picture an old-school personality—almost like a 1960s B-movie somehow wander...

For more than sixty years, Spider-Man has endured because, beneath the mask and the extraordinary abilities, Peter Parker remains one of the most recognizably human superheroes ever created. He worries about money. He disappoints the people he loves. He makes mistakes. And no matter how many times he saves New York—or perhaps the entire world—his victories nearly always come at a personal cost. Th...

Gloriously unhinged! Some movies ask us to admire their stories. Others ask us to admire the craftsmanship that brought them to life. Pinocchio Unstrung, the latest horror reimagining from the creative team behind Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, isn't a film I'll remember for its screenplay. The dialogue is often clunky or just bad, the characters are thinly drawn, and the story rarely surprises...

Magnificent moments in search of equally epic dramatic architecture? We shall see, as we review The Odyssey. Christopher Nolan has built a career on making films that inspire conversation long after the credits roll. Whether it's Memento, The Prestige, Inception, or Oppenheimer, audiences rarely leave simply talking about whether they liked the movie—they leave debating what Nolan was trying to ac...

When we talk about movies that celebrate cinema itself, our minds usually drift toward films like Singin' in the Rain, Hugo, a personal favorite of my mom’s, or perhaps The Artist. They're movies about moviemaking, about Hollywood, and about why the medium has endured for more than a century. Rarely would anyone expect to add a Minions movie to that list. And yet, Minions & Monsters surprised...

For nearly a decade, superhero movies have found themselves in something of an identity crisis. Some have become increasingly dark and self-serious. Others have tried to deconstruct the genre or expand sprawling cinematic universes until individual stories became secondary to future installments. Somewhere along the way, many forgot one simple truth: These movies are supposed to be fun. Supergirl...

Full disclosure, this movie is in need of higher intelligence. For nearly fifty years, few filmmakers have shaped our collective vision of extraterrestrial life more than Steven Spielberg. From Close Encounters of the Third Kind to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg helped define what alien stories could be. Sometimes they were wondrous. Sometimes they were frightening. But they almost always p...

When we think of D-Day, we tend to think of the beaches. We think of Omaha. Utah. The landing craft. The paratroopers. The extraordinary courage displayed by thousands of Allied troops on June 6, 1944. What we rarely think about is the weather. Yet one of the most consequential decisions of World War II had nothing to do with troop movements or battlefield tactics. It involved a forecast. Before t...

One of the most fascinating developments in modern filmmaking is the rise of directors whose careers began not in film school or the studio system, but on YouTube. Armed with digital cameras, editing software, and a direct connection to audiences, a new generation of filmmakers has emerged—many of whom possess remarkable technical skill. They understand pacing, editing, visual composition, and how...

On this episode of ReelTalk, we are reviewing Mortal Kombat II. Video game movies have come a long way. For years, adaptations of beloved games struggled to capture what made their source material work in the first place. Filmmakers often seemed embarrassed by the games themselves—stripping away mythology, simplifying characters, or attempting to reinvent stories that audiences already loved. But...

On this episode of ReelTalk...Twenty years after the original film became a cultural touchstone, the characters of Runway magazine return to a very different world—one defined not by glossy covers and editorial authority, but by layoffs, algorithms, and the steady erosion of traditional media. The Devil Wears Prada 2 attempts to grapple with that reality. The story places Miranda Priestly and her...

On this episode of ReelTalk, we’re discussing a movie that arrives with enormous expectations, enormous talent, and—perhaps inevitably—enormous debate. Michael is, at its best, a spectacle. At its worst, it is a sequence of moments searching for a story to connect them. There is no question that the film delivers visually. The concert and music-video sequences are dazzling, meticulously staged rec...

Seventy-five years ago, audiences walked into movie theaters expecting a monster movie—What they got instead was something far more unsettling. In 1951, The Thing from Another World arrived at a moment when the world itself felt uncertain. The Second World War had ended, the Cold War was beginning, and humanity was staring into the unknown—into the atomic age, into the skies above, and into the po...

After technical difficulties on the 17th of March prevented the Sound Sessions St. Patrick's Day episode from broadcasting, host Tom Hoots got the entire crew back together this week to bring to you what you should have heard on the 17th. 

It isn’t often anymore that we experience a movie that reminds us why we fell in love with the movies in the first place. Not because it reinvents the wheel… but because it understands how the wheel works. Project Hail Mary is that kind of film. It’s big, bold science fiction—filled with cosmic stakes and dazzling visuals—but at its core, it’s built on something far simpler and far more enduring:...

On this episode of Sound Sessions, host Tom Hoots features singer/songwriter Steve Monce.

There’s a good movie somewhere inside The Bride!—perhaps several. The irony is that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ambitious reimagining of the Frankenstein mythos feels almost as stitched together as the monster at its center. The film clearly springs from a place of imagination and artistic ambition, drawing inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and James Whale’s immortal Bride of Frankenstein from...