Author: Ezra Stead

It is a rare and special thing to have an entire movie theater to oneself. My most memorable one was actually with a friend, when we saw a restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey in an otherwise empty auditorium. I still cannot fathom why only two tickets were sold to such an amazing movie at…

Nearly three years after every movie theater in the country closed indefinitely, this particular film cricket feels like things are surprisingly almost back to normal. Though I didn’t come close to my viewing numbers for 2019 (113), I easily beat my records for 2020 (74) and 2021 (83) with this year’s 98 movies, several of…

Faye (Dale Dickey) lives alone in a trailer currently parked at a campsite overlooking a view so gorgeous it’s hard to believe it is real and not a matte painting of the type employed as background in old Hollywood westerns. She lives simply, always finding the perfect song for the moment on her old transistor…

It is nearly impossible to begin describing the relentlessly entertaining over-the-top Indian historical action epic RRR (Rise Roar Revolt), so let’s begin roughly where the movie does, with the introductions of its two lead characters. Based on real Indian revolutionaries from the early 20th century, each is given an entrance that an average action movie…

An amuse-bouche of mystery and rising tension bursts into shocking flavor in the early courses with the introduction of a familiar but always startling red claret, finishing with redolent notes ranging from The Wicker Man to Ratatouille (the movie, not the “peasant dish” after which it was named), which combine in the climactic denouement to…

The original Orphan was a “real slice of trash deserving of a long shelf life,” as our own Matt Cale wrote in his excellent review of the crafty and relentlessly entertaining 2009 thriller. “Or at least until Esther rises from her watery grave for a sequel.” Thirteen years later, we finally have that sequel (actually…