Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck.
The hotly anticipated sequel to Top Gun, the 1986 movie that made Tom Cruise a star, is raking in cash, great reviews, and even Oscar buzz. Don’t be fooled — it’s the same glorified military recruitment video that the original was.
The cult-favorite TV show Bob's Burgers is now a movie — and it works, even if its low-key charms don’t always dazzle on the big screen.
Ray Liotta has died suddenly at the age of 67. He should have been a major star — but after his greatest role in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, we never really got a chance to see everything he could do.
Alex Garland’s Men is a horror movie about how awful it is to be a woman. But he’s so intent on driving this point home that all the terror drains out of the film by the end, and only annoyance at the didactic exercise remains.
Stephen King’s original Firestarter novel was a product of post-Watergate rage toward the CIA. But horror production company Blumhouse’s second adaptation can’t keep the flame alive.
True crime has come a long way from the cheap, lurid days of America’s Most Wanted. The new HBO Max series The Staircase, starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette, has the posh cast and opulent production values that showcase the genre's evolution.
I wanted to love Robert Eggers’s follow-up to The Witch and The Lighthouse, but maybe a big-budget Viking saga just isn’t the right fit for a wonderful weirdo like him?
The debut folk horror film You Won’t Be Alone, set in 19th-century Macedonia, is an amazingly mature piece of work that weighs the overwhelming, bloody brutality of the world against its strange enchantments.
The real-life Nicolas Cage has long since embraced the loony, overacting, movie star persona fostered by young, social media–savvy fans who’ve generated a million memes in his honor — and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a gift to them.
It might seem like the most compelling aspect of Everything Everywhere All at Once is its fast-paced, cleverly controlled chaos. But when the wacky fun fades, a portrayal of extraordinary emotional complexity is revealed.
Richard Linklater’s latest autobiographical film, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, is a doting tribute to middle-class family life in the suburbs of Houston. Good luck making it through the whole unbearably sentimental movie in one sitting.
The new documentary series Jeen-yuhs keeps Kanye’s recent tabloid absurdities out of the picture. But such turbulent antics and generalized disorder are an essential piece of the remarkable — and remarkably chaotic — career he has built.
Judd Apatow’s latest film, The Bubble, is a toothless satire of Hollywood insanity and the experience of living and working in a “bubble” mandated by COVID lockdown. It’s a pointless, dated movie that no one needs in 2022.
The Outfit is a modest crime drama about the danger of underestimating strangers. It’s the kind of movie that would have been a pleasure to stumble upon in a theater in the old days of leisure time when people had a few hours to kill.
The people in the somber new sci-fi film After Yang are god-awful. If this movie represents our near future, that Earth-destroying asteroid can’t obliterate us fast enough.
Kimi, the new thriller from director Steven Soderbergh, is an ordinary genre piece — so ordinary that not even its insistent topicality can make it seem more compelling.
Men will literally become Batman instead of going to therapy.
Ben Stiller’s excellent new limited series, Severance, turns the corporate workplace into the setting for a new and timely subgenre: “job horror.”
In Pam & Tommy, the story of the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape becomes an epic tale of thwarted American dreams.
Spinning comedy out of misery, Joel and Ethan Coen have spent decades telling the story of American failure. No wonder they’re so drawn to American socialists.