Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
Two indie horror movies with YouTube origins, Obsession and Backrooms, crushed big-budget Star Wars and He-Man movies at the box office. But claims that these films represent a revival of cinematic creativity à la the New Hollywood era are overblown.
Nicolas Cage’s black-and-white Spider-Man spin-off, Spider-Noir, recycles all of the tropes of the classic 1940s film genre. But all the femme fatales and wisecracking detectives can’t keep Spider-Noir from feeling like a lifeless museum piece.
Boots Riley’s remarkably easy confidence and visual flair in I Love Boosters is a tonic in an era of boring CGI slop. He’s one of the most compelling filmmakers working today.
The Criterion Channel’s excellent new “Office Romances” retrospective shows how Hollywood’s classic workplace comedies exposed a deep panic about women who dared to be competent.
Jack Thorne’s Netflix adaptation of Lord of the Flies drowns William Golding’s brutal clarity in arty excess, muddled psychology, and a strangely sentimental plea for sympathy for boys.
At this point, the Devil Wears Prada franchise is a major cultural phenomenon. And The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a worthy addition, with more than a dash of topicality in its treatment of some of the bleaker aspects of contemporary existence.
The average successful Hollywood biopic is cynically dishonest and rote in its formulaic box-checking. Michael, the new film on the life of Michael Jackson, is all that and worse.
Criterion Channel is hosting a retrospective on Hollywood’s “corporate thrillers” from the 1980s through the early 2000s. If anything, their message about the capitalist rot in America’s institutions looks far too tame for how the last couple of decades turned out.
Jonah Hill’s new Apple TV Hollywood satire, Outcome, wants to skewer celebrity culture. But even with the likable Keanu Reeves, its muddled script and self‑pitying subtext reveal more about the industry’s narcissism than the film ever intended.
With President Donald Trump recently threatening to destroy Iranian civilization itself, the country’s filmmakers carry on their long tradition of defiant, deeply human cinema forged under censorship, imprisonment, and war.
Cillian Murphy’s final turn as Tommy Shelby in Netflix’s Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a brooding, gorgeous farewell to one of TV’s great antiheroes.
Dystopian teen films will remain popular as long as they keep reflecting truths about young people’s prospects under capitalism.
Ryan Gosling’s new space film, Project Hail Mary, blends doomsday stakes with a surprisingly tender cross‑species friendship, offering a rare blockbuster that admits the planet is worth saving — and that solidarity might still matter.
Reminders of Him is exactly the movie novelist Colleen Hoover set out to make — which is the problem.
At a time of profound unrest and the launch of an insane new war, Hollywood mostly stuck to its “keep politics out” mandate at this year’s Academy Awards. Javier Bardem, however, stood firm: no to war, and freedom for Palestine.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! swings for a radical, genre-bending reinvention of Bride of Frankenstein. But the result is a messy, overstuffed film that makes an awkward attempt at feminist relevance.
The three-decade-old Scream franchise is back and more profitable than ever. But the series’s trademarked meta-commentary about slasher movie conventions has long since worn thin.
How to Make a Killing, starring Glen Powell, is a modern-day remake of a 1949 British black comedy classic. But whereas the original found comedy in the ruthless murder of a nasty aristocracy, this remake is far too timid for our times.
Gore Verbinski’s new film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, is so strangely ineffectual that the main fascination while watching it is trying to figure out why nothing the film does is working.
Emily Brontë’s novel deserves a more sophisticated approach than Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.