Seeing as how it tells the story of five characters enduring a deadly odyssey, it’s fitting that Triple Frontier took a circuitous route to the screen. Originally developed by director Kathryn Bigelow and her frequent collaborator, screenwriter Mark ...

After using a wild sci-fi conspiracy storyline to explore American race relations in his acclaimed debut film Get Out, writer-director Jordan Peele conjures a different sort of nightmare with his new picture, Us. This film’s trippy narrative, which c...

Much has been written about Captain Marvel marking a milestone for Marvel Studios because it’s the company’s first movie with a solo female lead, and much has been written about the social media trolls who find this milestone disturbing. Now that the...

The comedy-drama Fighting with My Family, about the life of a wrestling star who performed under the name “Paige” before retiring last year, might seem like it’s only for diehard WWE fans. But like most of the best sports movies, Fighting with My Fam...

Few hybrid genres are as appealing as the romantic comedy/thriller mashup because when this style of storytelling clicks, audiences get to savor the excitement of action sequences and the warmth of a love story, with jokes sprinkled into the mix for ...

Songwriters face an inherent conundrum when trying to innovate because the chromatic scale of Western music includes only 12 unique notes. The challenge is to arrange and combine these limited resources in surprising ways. A similar conundrum faces t...

“They invented a game on top of a game,” observes a veteran coach in the new sports drama High Flying Bird. Within the context of its scene, the line refers to how long ago, white NBA executives created an infrastructure to retain control at the infl...

Cinematic satire has become something of a lost art. During the so-called “age of irony” in the 90s, the notion of presenting exaggeration as a means of revealing hypocrisy (or other social foibles) became somewhat redundant. Close to two decades lat...

M. Night Shyamalan, modern king of the twist ending, outdid himself with the final scene of Split (2016) — his surprise hit about a serial killer with multiple personalities — by connecting the picture to Unbreakable (2000), his cult-favorite thrille...