“It isn't fair. I never had anybody but you. Not a real husband. Not even a man. Just a bad joke without a punch line.”

If I was tasked to list my ten favorite crime thrillers, this would surely land in there. Out of all the bleak entries from noir’s heyday, The Killing is one of the classics that enthralls me the most.

Thanks to crackling dialogue from pulp writer Jim Thompson, a then-experimental narrative bouncing from multiple vantages—all equally riveting—and…

Shot almost exclusively on the Cinecittà Studios soundstage in Italy, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer begins narratively straightforward á la a Call Me By Your Name type of love story. But by the end, it is much more analogous to Black Narcissus; which was similarly shot by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger on a soundstage.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that Guadagnino’s stated this is his tribute to cinema’s greatest writer-director duo, and although this was released in the same year as Challengers, this feels…

After an ittedly impressive explosion sequence, this post-Y2K techno thriller (rocking that same brown-green tint seen in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS) quickly regresses into some pretty bad dialogue, a plot stringing along several different threads with poor attempts at cohesion, and misogynistic moments. Sweat is visible as the direction does everything in its power to make the scenes of Jackman hacking computers engaging, kinetic and intense. Of course, there’s John Travolta’s fake soul patch-wearing villain.

Yet SWORDFISH is rarely…

If I had to describe Robert Pattinson’s portrayal of the Caped Crusader, imagine he riffs on Kurt Cobain as Jack Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes by way of Frank Miller’s Bruce Wayne. The moodiness of his take, as he and director Matt Reeves have almost irascibly described at length during numerous recent interviews, is more than justified upon watching this film; yet the movie has such a heart, genuine sexual chemistry and the detective aspects that have been missing from several previous…