Weekend Film Reviews

It took world-class makeup and prosthetics to turn Tom Cruise into Digger Rockwell, the titular star of Alejandro Iñáritu’s climate apocalypse satire Digger – even though Rockwell happens to be roughly as old as Cruise is in real life. The actor’s dramatic physical transformation is one of many heightened choices in the film, which, according to critic Christy Lemire, makes its arguments too loudly fo...

NBC’s hidden camera series, To Catch a Predator, transfixed audiences in the early 2000s. Host Chris Hansen baited suspected child predators with actors playing minors, then intervened at the last second with police. A new film, Primetime, asks whether this was moral. “After the screening, I couldn’t get home fast enough to take a shower,” says Shawn Edwards, film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas...

What do you know about concrete? Not much, reckons John Wilson, the deliciously awkward filmmaker behind the HBO series How To with John Wilson. That show is an exercise in misdirection: each episode begins as a tutorial, narrated by Wilson, on how to complete a certain task — before meandering into unexpected territory. In keeping with that model, his new film, The History of Concrete, is about more than the bui...

There’s no outrunning it. Anyone writing a monster movie must eventually decide whether or not they’re going to show their monster. As Steven Spielberg demonstrated in Jaws, it’s usually more frightening to hide the face of the beast. But if the credits roll and it’s still hidden, the audience is going to be mad. In Hope, an alien movie set just south of the Korean DMZ, director Na Hong-Jin puts...

Forget “6-7.” In 1990s Middletown, New York, a high school class figured out how to really drive the adults crazy: exposing a toxic waste scandal in their backyard. A new documentary, Teenage Wasteland, tells the true story of a group of students that stumbled onto a major scoop. To uncover the truth, they followed the money, grilled corrupt local officials and got on the wrong side of the mob. Angelica Jad...

After decades of unsuccessful attempts to catch Roadrunner using anvils, jet packs, and rockets strapped to roller skates, Wile E. Coyote (caninus litigious) has a new weapon in his arsenal: #BigLaw. But Mr. Coyote is now directing his ire toward the Acme Corporation, which manufactures said devices that always seem to literally blow up in his face. Shawn Edwards, film critic at Fox4 News in Kansas City, says this movi...

It’s rarely a good sign if you’ve devoted hours to a horror franchise and you still aren’t sure what it’s about. But film critic Alonso Duralde gave it a try with Insidious: Out of The Further. “I’ve seen five of the six Insidious movies, and I feel like I still couldn’t pass a pop quiz about what ‘The Further’ is and how it works,” says Duralde, the co-host o...

There are a few indispensable ingredients in any stoner flick worth its weight in weed. After drug-addled antics, the most important ingredient could be the friends we made along the way. Cheech and Chong. The Dude and Walter. Harold and Kumar. Stoner comedies seem to always follow a pair of buddies – and those buddies are usually men. That’s not true of The Wrong Girls, which stars Kristen Stewart and Alia...

Anthony Bourdain swears that he used to be unlikeable. That’s hard to believe for many fans of the late celebrity chef, but he wrote frankly about that period of his life in his best-selling memoir, Kitchen Confidential. The biopic Tony looks at the year he spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts, learning how to show up to work on time and, slowly, how to cook. His brattiness is key to the success of the movie, acc...

Gregg Araki is one of the most important directors in the New Queer Cinema, the 1990s film movement that put daring and dark LGBTQ stories onscreen and produced household names like Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes. Araki’s movies The Living End and Doom Generation followed cynical queer teenagers as they wrestled with sex and death in an America that didn’t want or understand them. I Want Your Sex is about a new doom gener...

Luis Valdez is widely known as the Godfather of Chicano theater. He directed the 1987 movie 'La Bamba' and the 1981 film 'Zoot Suit.' But Valdez also founded El Teatro Campesino, the in-house theater troupe for the United Farm Workers. His life is now the subject of a new documentary, ‘American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.’ Film critics Dave White and Alonso Duralde call the film a “well-deserved victory la...

'The Odyssey' discourse has been hard to escape ever since the cast was first announced early 2025. The film finally hits theaters this weekend, but does it live up to Homer’s epic poem? &ldquo...

In Disclosure Day, a government whistleblower and a local journalist race to expose the existence of aliens and the conspiracy to cover it up. Shawn Edwards, film critic for FOX4 News in Kansas City and co-founder of the African American Film Critics Association, calls this the third act in Spielberg's “space invaders” trilogy, dating back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra Terre...