Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
For three whole hours, Avatar: The Way of Water evokes Important Issues — imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, ransacking the environment for commodifiable resources — in the silliest, shallowest way possible.
It’s not really clear what Damien Chazelle is trying to accomplish in his latest, Babylon. The movie is so awful that he should probably be banished from Hollywood.
There aren’t enough films depicting runaway slaves fighting off Southern racists on the way to freedom. So when that premise is wasted on a terrible movie, as it is in Will Smith’s Emancipation, it’s a great tragedy.
Robert Downey Jr’s documentary tribute to his father, Sr., wants to mimic his dad’s avant-garde filmmaking. But the film lacks coherence, and its subject and filmmaker’s obscene wealth gets in the way of making that case.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is handsome and well-crafted. But the film’s intertwining of traditional Catholicism, Fascism, and dysfunctional families with gooey sentimentality makes a stew of ingredients that don’t go well together.
With Violent Night, we were promised a deranged, Santa-meets-Die–Hard flick shorn of holiday schmaltz. Instead, the action-comedy just another soppy movie about the Christmas spirit.
Netflix’s new Addams Family show puts Wednesday’s teenaged emotional life front and center — and suffers for it.
The screwball comedy The Devil and Miss Jones exemplifies how pro-worker Hollywood was just on the eve of McCarthyism.
Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans is a dull, self-indulgent victory lap for the most victorious filmmaker in history.
Director Rian Johnson follows up on his 2019 crowd-pleaser Knives Out with Glass Onion, this time taking aim at an Elon Musk–esque billionaire and his frenemies. Unfortunately, Netflix has ensured you only have a week to see it with an actual crowd.
Written by Weird Al himself and starring Daniel Radcliffe, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a biopic parody that mocks the prestige form at every turn. It may very well save you from the worst interludes of family togetherness this weekend.
The new movie My Policeman, starring Harry Styles, is inspired by novelist E. M. Forster’s 40-year relationship with policeman Robert Buckingham that began in 1930. The details of that romance are stirring — much more so than what we get in the film.
Triangle of Sadness is more than a little over the top at times. But so what? Unlike every other movie at the theaters, it’s over the top in its scathing portrayal of the ugly realities of contemporary inequality.
In Bruges’s director Martin McDonagh reunites with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for a story of an Irish friendship gone sour. And it’s easily the best new movie I’ve seen in forever.
Wendell & Wild is gorgeous, daringly creative, and stunning to watch. Yet Netflix has put almost no effort or resources into promoting the film.
In The Good Nurse, a serial killer’s murders are disguised by the frequently nightmarish workings of hospitals in a for-profit health care system.
Todd Field wants you to think his new movie Tár is a critique of the pretentiousness of the high art world. But the movie is actually trapped in that suffocating world and can’t find a way out.
It’s never a bad time to revisit John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live, a hilarious sci-fi thriller that skewers the inequality of the neoliberal era and offers an iconic depiction of capitalist ideology.
Credit to David O. Russell for trying to make a movie, Amsterdam, that’s unique and compelling. He didn’t really succeed, but at least he tried.
Angela Lansbury, who died this week at 96, was a proud socialist who achieved enormous success in film, theater, and TV. Yet her astonishing range was botched by the Hollywood studio system — preventing her movie career from flourishing even more.