Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
The big-budget Wonder Woman sequel is an ugly, tedious, bloated, badly CGI-ed mess and a wretchedly directed film. And yet critics keep making excuses for it because of its supposed social relevance.
David Fincher’s ode to Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz revives an eighty-year-old debate over whether or not Orson Welles deserves a co-writing credit — and it’s exactly as entertaining as that sounds.
The first film in Steve McQueen’s new Amazon Prime anthology chronicles the struggle for racial justice in Britain with the 1970s Mangrove Nine trial. It’s a wonderful achievement and valuable popular education on the British struggles against racist policing.
A new Showtime docuseries reminds us of just how awful Ronald Reagan was and how his brand of demagogic racism became a model for Trump.
The only good thing we have to say about the reactionary film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy is that it’s so boringly told you’ll forget about it in an hour.
Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks is yet another meandering depiction of life as a bored and alienated celebrity.
John Carpenter’s movies provide visions of societies falling apart. No wonder his work is resonating now more than ever.
Amazon’s Borat sequel tries to replay the zany laughs of the original but picks easy, woke moralizing over funny social satire.
Netflix’s new Aaron Sorkin movie on the Chicago Seven tries — and fails — to turn a travesty of justice and an attack on the Left into a defense of American institutions.
The new season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo moves the action to 1950 Kansas City. It looks at Midwestern history and culture with raucous humor, wild plotting, and a rogues’ gallery of American oddballs in the best tradition of Mark Twain.
Get Out was a triumph. Antebellum tries to follow in its footsteps, but it completely fails at making a horror movie out of the experience of racism in America.
Ethan Hawke’s The Good Lord Bird is the thrilling cinematic depiction of radical abolitionist John Brown that we’ve been waiting for.
The controversy over the new Netflix movie Cuties is so stupid, you never should’ve heard about it. But it’s gotten so hysterically overblown by this point, it can’t be ignored anymore.
Ellen DeGeneres’s reputation as the kindest celebrity in America has finally been shattered. But it’s not just her “mean streak” that’s the problem — it’s that she’s an exploitative boss, who cheated her employees at the height of the pandemic.
More than any other actor of his era, Chadwick Boseman, who played a range of black heroes from Thurgood Marshall to T’Challa, had a capacity to inspire his audience and evoke a sense of pride in the triumphs and struggles of black people.
The new HBO series Lovecraft Country melds the macabre monster stories of H. P. Lovecraft with the real-life horror of Jim Crow America. Once again, Jordan Peele shows that the scariest American monster is the white-supremacist cop.
Movie theaters are set to reopen soon, but neither the safety of viewers, nor support for the film industry itself, can be guaranteed.
Seth Rogen’s new film prompted him to ask some searching questions about Jewish education in the diaspora today and drew significant attention after his criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But An American Pickle is a superficial portrait of Jewish experience in the New World and a corny rags-to-riches story of immigration.
Movies about class and inequality have made it into the global mainstream recently and are picking up major prizes. The genre-busting, edge-of-your-seat Brazilian film Bacurau is the latest. You’ve gotta see it.
Period dramas too often treat their subject with polite reverence and slavish accuracy. Tony McNamara’s new show, The Great, flips the genre on its head, telling the story of Russia’s great Empress with all the grotesque comedy the eighteenth-century Russian court deserves.