Crackling performances and a twisty plot that mixes melodrama with suspense recommend “The Whisper Man,” a new thriller based on an Alex North novel. It’s “Silence of the Lambs” paying homage to “The Slender Man,” a tale of fathers and … Continue reading →

I’m standing at the cineplex Thursday night pondering, “Do I duck into ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ after catching “The Dog Stars,” or do I just wait until those “Idiots” Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson, Jr. show up? Silly me. While we … Continue reading →

Anybody who’s ever done restaurant work knows that you grow up fast in a kitchen. The speed and urgency, the pressure cooker of it all — people thrown together in hot, confined spaces, trying to work in concert with each … Continue reading →

“Idiots” is a buddy comedy with raunchy promise, funny players and no pace. I mean NONE. If this was “Midnight Run,” which it resembles, it’d be “Midnight Stroll.” If it was “The Last Detail,” which also figures in its plotting, … Continue reading →

“The Dog Stars” is the sort of movie that late August is infamous for — a dog that the studio couldn’t figure out how to fix or market into a success, so they dumped it on Labor Day Weekend. It’s … Continue reading →

It was a gilded age for high-minded British cinema, of larger than life actors taking on epics as heroes and antiheroes — a life of “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Becket,” “Cromwell,” a dash or two of Shakespeare, and “A Man for … Continue reading →

Movies built around mental maladies have a couple of consistent shortcomings, both of which the Teresa Palmer OCD dramedy “Addition” struggles with, start to finish. There’s a tendency to treat something serious as cute and quirky. Obsessively counting everything from … Continue reading →

The new Netflix documentary, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing,” is another “Boeing: What Went Wrong/Downfall of Boeing” expose. But this one celebrates the whistleblowers within the airliner manufacturer who sounded the alarm and often paid a price for it as … Continue reading →

When Jason Statham growls, “Trust me, I’m coming back for everybody,” what self-respecting hostage wouldn’t consider themselves as good as rescued? J.Sta’s latest, “Mutiny,” is a “Die Hard” at sea that, thank to “Mesrine” director Jean-François Richet, uses that laybrinthine … Continue reading →

It turns out, putting the two dudes who scripted “The Hangover” (and “Bad Moms”) in charge of writing and directing a midlife crisis moms at a spa farce wasn’t the smartest move ever. “Spa Weekend” — a title as colorless … Continue reading →