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The new Fantastic Four movie is the best of the generally awful Fantastic Four movies to date. If you had the good luck to have missed the 2007 "Rise of the Silver Surfer," which focused bizarrely on wedding preparations for the union of Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman, you may not care that in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps," this super ...Read more

In the world of Jerry Kane (Nick Offerman), the government is an implacable enemy. Jerry promotes this view on the conspiracy-oriented radio shows on which he sometimes guests, and in the traveling seminars he hosts as he drives around Arkansas and environs in his little white van. "If you're a U.S. citizen," he tells one gathering in a rural ...Read more

Let us now praise James Gunn, writer-director of the new Superman movie, for sparing us yet another rehash of the cape-man's origin story. Can there be a single fan anywhere who doesn't know it by now? How baby Kal-El was rocketed off the imploding planet of Krypton by his scientist father; how he landed on Earth and was taken in by Ma and Pa ...Read more

Considering what a full-on action queen she is, Charlize Theron has been underserved by the movie biz. Just on the basis of past slammers like the epochal "Mad Max: Fury Road" and the whomping "Atomic Blonde" (with its tremendous, 10-minute bash-and-crash centerpiece scene), she has long deserved her own action franchise. "The Old Guard," drawn ...Read more

Despite her (obviously bogus) death-by-moppet in the first film, saucy robot girl M3GAN is back in action in the new sequel, "M3GAN 2.0." And how is it? Well, the movie suffers from narrative sprawl and thematic overkill, unfortunately, but it's still fun. Just not quite as much.

In the two years since the events of the original movie (which ...Read more

The first thing a reviewer should probably do with some movies is to offer only the most general assessment of their twists and secrets. In the case of Danny Boyle's new "28 Years Later" -- a movie of raw, bloodthirsty ambition -- any attempt to describe the picture in useful detail must risk igniting the ire of basement-dwelling spoilerati, who...Read more

"Materialists" is not a rom-com, you may be happy to note. Oh, it's not entirely without rom -- in fact modern romance is its subject, although one about which it has earnest reservations. As for the com part of the ancient Hollywood formula, well, the picture is not without amusement, either, although its laughs are not telegraphed so far in ...Read more

If nothing else, "Ballerina" -- an offshoot of the "John Wick" franchise, as its full title helpfully clarifies -- establishes once again that women can be fully convincing hard-action stars. (This will come as breaking news only to those who've missed Charlize Theron cracking heads in "Atomic Blonde," Carrie-Anne Moss leap-kicking various ...Read more

Over the course of nearly 30 years, director Wes Anderson has built an avid following with his distinctive films, from the 1996 "Bottle Rocket" to the 2014 "Grand Budapest Hotel." Most of his movies, with their toybox sets and locked-down pictorial style, look like no others. In recent years, however, Anderson seems to have bogged down in his ...Read more

What's the coolest stunt Tom Cruise has pulled off over the course of his 29 years of "Mission: Impossible" movies? Would it be the spectacular climb up (and run back down) the side of Dubai's Burj Khalifa skyscraper in the fourth film, "Ghost Protocol"? Or maybe the high-flying motorcycle/parachute leap in the seventh one, "Dead Reckoning"? Or,...Read more

Down here south of the border, Canada is often coded as mild-mannered and bland. But look closely beneath the surface of such choice Canadian films as David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" or Atom Egoyan's "Chloe" and you find dark things squirming around. Jason Buxton's "Sharp Corner" is very much this sort of picture. It begins high in a sunny sky ...Read more

At its best, which is pretty much whenever Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively are onscreen together, "Another Simple Favor" approaches the near-perfection of the 2018 movie that preceded it. If the new picture doesn't quite achieve the elevated state of the first one, the fault lies in its madly complicated storyline and, oddly, the sunny ...Read more