Film Reviews

Mayu Akikawa is a young psychologist, awkwardly trying to find her bearings in a new hospital, when she is assigned a nameless young girl as her first patient. A recently orphaned victim of extreme mental and physical abuse, the “Mysterious ...

Come to Daddy (2019) is that most difficult of beasts to review: a film that has so much to recommend, including many secrets, successful twists, and brilliant performances, but giving away too much would spoil the movie. Loaded with uncomfortable ...

*In memory of French film actress Edith Scob Although often referred to as a dark, gothic fairy tale, Georges Franju’s 1960 film Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) is perhaps more aptly described as a frozen, static fairy ...

I love New York. No, I don’t mean the real New York, not the modern New York, but that legendary, dangerous, terrifying, otherworldly New York of the 1970s and early 1980s. I love the New York artists of Patti Smith, ...

Two years after her erotic thriller exploitation masterpiece Stripped to Kill (1987), writer-director Katt Shea debuted a sequel that, in many ways, might be even better than the original. Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls (1989), which turns 30 this year, retains all of ...

Retro-feel science fiction offering The Vast of Night (U.S., 2019) is homage done right. With loving nods to Rod Serling’s original run of The Twilight Zone, director Andrew Patterson’s debut feature uses that beloved, classic television series as a springboard ...

I didn’t grow up on Westerns, despite how they were often shoved down my throat. I hated Roy Rogers and John Wayne. The idea of The Lone Ranger and Zorro was all right, but I preferred my masked vigilantes a ...

In 1977 – nearly 3 1/2 years after the release of The Exorcist (1973) and just a few months before its impossibly awful sequel – came Audrey Rose. Based on Frank De Felitta’s pulpy best-seller (“The novel of reincarnation”), it had a great cast and ...

Investing a police procedural film with elements grounded in the real world and hints of the supernatural is not an easy balancing act because viewers who are not interested in the latter element may find themselves unwilling to suspend disbelief ...

The Magic of Lassie is the first Lassie film in almost three decades, and although it doesn’t have the tender charm and elegance of the original masterpiece Lassie Come Home (1943) or later fare such as The Courage of Lassie ...