By Meg Shields It’s been eight years since Tarsem Singh released a movie. But that pales in comparison to the twenty years it took him to make Dear Jassi, a tragedy whose twists and turns would be unbelievable and overwrought if not for the horrifying fact that they really happened. The film dramatizes the events…

By Meg Shields Wouldn’t it be great if the guy behind Hunt For the Wilderpeople and Boy took a break from counting his Marvel money to make another intimate, small-stakes feel-good drama set in Polynesia? Pay no attention to that curling monkey’s paw. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. Based on the 2014 documentary…

By Meg Shields It’s time to reset the clocks: we’ve got a genuinely delightful American studio comedy on our hands. Rising above its “hmm” status as a direct-to-Hulu original, Quiz Lady is a charming, unpretentious cinematic equivalent of mac ’n cheese. It’s not going to surprise you. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The…

By Meg Shields They said it couldn’t be done. But someone has finally made a boring movie about Olivia Colman being horny. Directed by Sam Mendes, shot by Roger Deakins, and scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Empire of Light is a technically proficient but hopelessly superficial tale that follows Hilary (Colman), a listless…

By Meg Shields Despite being billed as a satire, Bros is, formally speaking, a familiar bedfellow within the rom-com space. Nicholas Stoller’s crowdpleaser slots in nicely alongside a long lineage of anti-romantic comedies so named for their fiercely independent protagonists who find their way from cynicism to sentimentality in the presence of The One Person…

By Meg Shields Knives Out is a massively fun, if blissfully unsubtle, old-school whodunnit from Star Wars helmer Rian Johnson. The film takes place in a manor presumably built by the same contractor behind Laurence Olivier’s mansion in Sleuth, and revolves around the mysterious death of the Thrombrey family’s patriarch, Harlan (Christopher Plummer). The writing…