Based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, American Fiction puts Jeffrey Wright front and center as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a novelist-turned-professor who has been critically praised but popularly ignored. Ellison has always been righteously opposed to the...
In The Holdovers, Paul Giamatti plays classics professor Paul Hunham at Barton Academy, a preparatory school in New England for boys. The Vietnam War casts a shadow over the school, notably for cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), whose Barton graduate...
Buzz Bissinger worked as an investigative reporter, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his work tackling corruption in the Philadelphia court system. But his 1990 book Friday Night Lights is widely considered one of the best sportswriting pieces ever, and the cinematic...
In the sequel to the 2019 breakout hit Shazam! we see the Billy Batson-turned-Shazam hero (Zachary Levi) struggling with his relatively new-found powers and the scattering of his family due to age and changing priorities. He longs to retain his childhood but also...
Before Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Ben Affleck, or Robert Pattinson donned the cowl, before Tobey Maguire discovered great power webslinging through New York, before Hulk smashed the puny god in Avengers tower or Thanos snapped,...
I was skeptical of Champions at first, the English remake of a Spanish film about a basketball coach rehabbing his career after a drug-involved arrest that nets him community service as a coach for some adults with special needs. It's too easy to find stories like...
I am a little surprised at how "high"-ly I'd rate Cocaine Bear. I imagined it would be worth a laugh or two, and have a few memorable bear-versus-human battles, but I never imagined that I would actually recommend it to people. Directed by Elizabeth Banks and produced...
The stack of 4K Ultra HD films on my desk kept growing, and thanks to spring break (yes, it's still a thing for adults with kids!), I was able to wade through the extensive list of films that had arrived over the last few weeks. There was a newer classic - Antoine...
Jason Sudeikis' Ted Lasso is my spirit animal. I want to be like him when I grow up. Maybe not the mustache and disdain for English tea...but he's pretty awesome. In fact, I would tell you that to my surprise, a television show based on an NBC ad for the World Cup is...
