Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is not a good movie. But with its massive box office success, Big Jim Cameron is undeniably giving the people what they want. And what they want is skimpily dressed giant blue aliens.
With nothing but a new cut of Kill Bill to offer, Quentin Tarantino has gone into semiretirement right as American cinema is fighting for its very life. And to make matters worse, he won’t stop talking smack.
Rob Reiner and his wife were killed yesterday. While Donald Trump tweets out a disgraceful, mocking memorial, we’re celebrating a man who made a decade of great cinema as well as a liberal mensch who stood in stark contrast to the inhuman cruelty of MAGA.
Fritz Lang’s masterful visual depiction of class stratification in Metropolis remains unrivaled by its would-be inheritors.
Wake Up Dead Man is another crowd-pleasing entry in writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out murder mystery franchise. It’s the kind of movie that should be crushing it with audiences on the big screen. But Netflix would rather you see it on their streamer.
Noah Baumbach and George Clooney’s Jay Kelly is a Netflix dramedy about the death of Hollywood stardom and the theatrical experience. Ironically, with Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros., the call is definitely coming from inside the house.
Edgar Wright’s dystopian satire, The Running Man, tries to play it safe and ends up pleasing no one.
Predator: Badlands delivers a fresh spin on the nearly 40-year-old franchise by delving deeper into the alien society at the heart of the franchise. Judging by the impressive box office performance, it’s a rare hit in an otherwise dismal movie season.
Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited Frankenstein adaptation for Netflix is a big, bloated mess. Much like Frankenstein’s Creature, it’s dead matter, crudely stitched and bolted together.
Richard Linklater must have extraordinary pull to get big-screen releases for his two esoteric period movies this year, because only a small group of avid American musical superfans will find Blue Moon interesting.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is the kind of well-done, serious drama that used to be commonplace in American filmmaking and now is vanishingly rare.
In Bugonia, Emma Stone plays a kidnapped pharmaceutical CEO trying to convince her deranged abductors that she’s not a sinister alien in disguise. As a portrait of our political impasse, it’s a shocking, wild ride with an ending you won’t see coming.
A combination of the breakdown of the Hollywood studio system, the decline of censorship, and the rise of wildly — and luridly — creative filmmakers across the world looking to cash in on sex and violence made 1960 the year of the modern horror film.
In Roofman, Channing Tatum plays a real-life lovable burglar and family man trying to make it in America. But while writer-director Derek Cianfrance clearly wanted a lighthearted, feel-good movie, Roofman is instead a dark exploration of American pathos.
The Criterion Channel’s retrospective on Robert Altman, the auteur behind masterpieces like Nashville, M*A*S*H, and The Long Goodbye, is a reminder that, not long ago, Hollywood backed maverick filmmakers ready to shake up the medium and the culture at large.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another deserves all the hype it’s getting. Run, don’t walk, to this thrilling, hilarious, moving, and all too prescient portrait of American radicals on the run from right-wing authoritarians.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey pairs Colin Farrell with Margot Robbie in a colorful, life-affirming fantasy setting. How could it go so wrong?
Robert Redford was a man of the Left until the end and a patron saint of independent cinema. He will be missed.
In the 1960s, Italian filmmakers took the cowboy out of America. They gave the western a wild, blood-soaked makeover that revived the genre for global audiences and imbued it with new political relevance.
After his post–Citizen Kane slump, Orson Welles teamed up with Universal for a big Hollywood comeback about corrupt police on the US-Mexico border. The executives balked at his vision — but today Touch of Evil is regarded as Welles’s final masterpiece.