Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck.
Three Thousand Years of Longing, director George Miller’s whimsical follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road, finds him returning to the gentle storytelling he perfected in the Babe films. Too bad this one’s a slog.
Aubrey Plaza’s title character in Emily the Criminal is trapped by crushing student loan debt, a punitive criminal justice system, and low wages. She, like so many other Americans, feels like she’s out of legitimate options — because she is.
With a solid premise about working-class vampire hunters, Day Shift had real potential — but there’s no escaping the Netflix curse.
At the heart of the new film Thirteen Lives lies a paradox. On the one hand, Ron Howard can be boring and annoying. On the other, caves are really cool, and we all want to see a group of teenagers get rescued from deep in the bowels of one.
Like so many horror films attempting to be subversive, Bodies Bodies Bodies tries to satirize the upper class. But all it delivers are tired, lazy tropes about Gen Z.
In FX’s The Bear, a struggling Chicago family restaurant is the site of hope and ambition — and it’s thrilling to watch.
Hollywood loves to crank out boring action movies. But Hulu’s Prey is anything but. It plays off of and reverses long-standing Hollywood tropes about Native Americans to craft an alien thriller that actually delivers.
Don’t let the glossy trailers fool you — Brad Pitt’s new action comedy, Bullet Train, is a strenuous and leaden film that never takes off.
Actor B. J. Novak’s impressive directorial debut, Vengeance, sends a Brooklyn writer out to West Texas in order to turn a family’s grief into a podcast. It’s a satire that nails our era like no other.
Writer-director Jordan Peele’s mysterious third film, Nope, draws on genre tropes from both alien invasion films and Westerns, but it ends up with something altogether original: a Hollywood spectacle about spectacle.
With its stock cratering and its audience shrinking, Netflix needs a savior. But The Gray Man, a bloated and boring $200 million action movie, is unlikely to be it.
Reese Witherspoon’s book club made the 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing a hit. The new film adaptation, just like the book it’s based on, is pure bathos of the mushiest kind.
Netflix’s Persuasion tries and fails to bring Fleabag’s irreverence to Jane Austen.
Taika Waititi’s second Thor film doubles down on his trademark mix of silliness and somberness. It still works — but it might not survive another sequel.
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis tries to sell audiences on a sanitized version of the King, missing the much weirder, wilder, and messier truth of his life and career.
Critics are fawning over Good Luck to You, Leo Grande for its “brave” sex positivity. But the crowd-pleasing comedy is actually anxiously prescriptive, and it relies on an angelic and selfless sex worker to teach a middle-aged woman how to love her body.
The latest Jurassic Park sequel is exhausted and running on fumes. Big, loud, annoying fumes.
How can someone take a band as exciting, wild, and innovative as the Sex Pistols and make such a conventional, paint-by-numbers miniseries? With Pistol, Danny Boyle found a way.
David Cronenberg’s latest film, Crimes of the Future, is a return to the “body horror” genre. It brings back the gross-out gore that first made his career in the 1970s — but without the thrills.
Two films about the Tennessee Valley Authority stress its utopian promise and the lives that had to be destroyed to fulfill it.