The Film Gang from KSQD

The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh’s latest foray into the intimacies of chamber comedy, stars Ian McKellan as Julian Sklar, a once influential and famous pop-era artist whose glory faded long ago. Now near the end of his life, he is mostly famous for being famous and makes his living recording cameos for those still besotted with […]

Michael, the bio pic directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan, offers a revealing look at the life of the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson. What makes the film especially intriguing is the involvement of his family members—several of his siblings and one of his sons- serving as producers. That raises the […]

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy — which has nothing to do with the franchise — opens with a parent’s worst nightmare. While living in Cairo, Charlie and Larissa’s (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa), eight-year-old daughter, Katie (Natalie Grace), is abducted from their backyard. Devastated, they eventually return to Albuquerque and try to rebuild their lives with […]

Film Review—Project Hail Mary By Molly Sullivan I’ll admit, I’m not usually drawn to films where Earth is on the brink of destruction and humanity and there is a mission to venture into deep space to save it.. That was my initial reaction when I first heard about Project Hail Mary. But this film offers […]

What makes a good adaptation? Is it sticking to the source material as faithfully as possible or breathing in new life by going in an entirely different direction? Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film Wuthering Heights provides the following answer to my original question: “Must an adaptation be good?” Based on the Emily Bronte novel of the […]

Crime 101 was the perfect remedy for a rainy day in Santa Cruz County. The 2026 crime thriller, written and directed by Bart Layton and based on Don Winslow’s 2020 novella, delivers a suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining ride. It was also the most crowded I’ve seen the Capitola CineLux in quite some time. The standout […]

To summarize the immense complexity of Sinners, from screenwriter and director Ryan Coogler, feels like a near impossible task. It can be described as a horror film, a period piece, or even a musical. All three of these components were expertly woven to create the film that has broken the record for most Oscar nominations […]

Everybody Wants to Rule the World rolls over the closing credits of Marty Supreme—a haunting, hopeful choice for Josh Safdie’s new sports comedy‑drama, co‑written with Ronald Bronstein. Timothée Chalamet—who’s recently played Willy Wonka, Bob Dylan, and now Marty Mauser—may finally get his long‑overdue recognition at this year’s Academy Awards. As Mauser, he’s a scrappy 23‑year‑old […]

Song Sung Blue, written and directed by Craig Brewer is based on the 2008 documentary of the same name by Greg Kohs, follows the lives of Lightning and Thunder—Mike and Claire Sardina—a couple from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as they pursue their dream of bringing happiness and joy to others through music in the mid-1990s. It has […]

Bugonia is a dark comedy with splashes of horror and science fiction, and it leans fully into its own strangeness. It is based on a South Korean film, Save the Green Planet! The blend of genres can feel chaotic, but that unpredictability is part of its charm. Emma Stone reunites with Yorgos Lanthimos to explore […]

Housemaid Film Review by Molly Sullivan Housemaid, the thriller based on the bestselling novel by Freda McFadden and directed by Paul Feig, is entertaining, slightly cheesy fun—with more plot twists than a pretzel. McFadden is known for mysteries that make you think you’ve figured everything out, only to reveal that nothing is quite as it […]

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, written and directed by Rian Johnson, raises the bar  on mystery thrillers that Johnson himself has previously set. Proving yet again his brilliance in  crafting a whodunit mystery, his latest film dares to elevate the power of storytelling to heavenly  heights.   Set in the fictional small town […]

Nuremberg is a post–World War II psychological thriller by James Vanderbilt, adapted from Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and The Psychiatrist. Russell Crowe is nearly unrecognizable as Hermann Göring, while Rami Malek is well cast as U.S. Army psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley, who is sent to study Nazi war criminals and determine their fitness for trial. […]

  Poor Things, the second collaboration between Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and Oscar-winner Emma Stone, is an ecstatically subversive fantasy that imagines how an adult woman might relate to the world if she had somehow sidestepped years of social indoctrination. Beginning in a Gilliamesque version of Victorian era London dappled with whimsy and wonder, Poor […]

Dream Scenario is a smart and insightful film about human nature, and marks another late-career high point for Nicolas Cage.

Stop Making Sense remains one of the most supremely satisfying concert movies ever made.

Barbie is a gleefully subversive look at the dehumanizing effects of inequality

Oppenheimer is a riveting cinematic experience

  Midway through Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s latest experiment in Brechtian distancing, a young girl is given a Rorschach test. Within every inkblot, she sees variations of the same thing. Detractors of Anderson’s work can undoubtedly relate to her; one of their main criticisms is that all of his films are more or less the […]

  If Travis Bickle – the antihero Paul Schrader created for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver – had an affair with a horticulturist, their love child might resemble Narvel Roth, the subject of Schrader’s latest film, Master Gardener. Travis and Narvel document their obsessive thoughts in journals, both are products of their violent pasts, and neither […]

Blackberry dramatizes the breathtaking rise and fall of the company behind the innovative communication device.

If you’re a fan of impressive world building done on a spectacular scale, Dune definitely delivers the goods.

  Suspenseful. Funny. Meditative. Disturbing. Mysterious: five adjectives that describe EO, the latest movie from the renowned Polish filmmaker, Jerzy Skolimowski. And yet, it’s challenging to explain how watching EO, which follows a donkey on a journey guided by the hand of man and fate, creates an experience greater than the sum of its parts. […]

Criticisms aside, Olivia Colman’s performance is the tide that lifts all ships.

  A morbidly obese man racked with self-loathing makes a desperate eleventh-hour attempt to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter in the overstuffed but worthwhile drama, The Whale. Brendan Fraser, reshaped by three hundred pounds of prosthetics, stars as Charlie. Charlie’s horrific physical condition isn’t the only thing that makes the titular metaphor so apropos; […]

Not unlike its two central characters, A Love Song speaks softly and honestly and without hyperbolic drama, making this little slice of senior romance a thought-provoking delight.

  An omnipotent being is threatening the multiverse. Who ya gonna call? Spiderman? Dr. Strange? How about a middle-aged Asian-American woman failing as a wife and mother? Her name is Evelyn, and she’s the unlikely hero of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the mind-bending action-comedy written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinerts, collectively […]

To Leslie is the type of film adults would flock to before Disney and superheroes saturated the market. Here’s hoping Andrea Riseborough’s controversial but well deserved Oscar nod inspires lovers of mature cinema to seek it out.

  The final chapter of a British gentleman’s life, numbed by decades of routine drudgery, blossoms with newfound purpose in the Oscar-nominated film, Living. Bill Nighy delivers a towering portrayal of understated pathos as Mr. Williams, the top bureaucrat at a public works office in 1953’s downtown London. As a widower, Mr. Williams lives with […]

Can the world find a solution before the cosmos delivers an Etch-A-Sketch erasure of all life on earth?

Apollo 10 ½ was one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2022.

  A group of self-indulgent one-percenters gets their comeuppance in Triangle of Sadness, the schadenfreude comedy written and directed by Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund. Ever since his 2014 international breakout film, Force Majeure, Östlund has been operating at peak artistic powers. With Triangle of Sadness, he earned his second Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes […]

  Look within the margins of a Steven Spielberg movie and every so often you’ll see him grappling with the aftereffects of his parent’s failed marriage. It might be Richard Dreyfus as the father who deserts his family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Tom Cruise playing a man estranged from his children […]

  In Martin McDonagh’s eagerly awaited fourth film, The Banshees of Inisherin, there’s a sparsely populated island just off the coast of Ireland known as… Inisherin. The year is 1920, and the islanders are a colorful lot trying to make the best of their uneventful lives. Pádraic, portrayed by Colin Farrell, and his best friend, […]

  Nearly two decades have passed since acclaimed auteur Todd Field released his last film. After his 2001 directorial debut, In the Bedroom, featuring Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson in their award-winning portrayal of a married couple struggling with grief, Field took five years to deliver his acclaimed second feature, Little Children, which exposed the […]

  Earlier this year, Jordan Peele released his third thriller, Nope, a completely unique amalgam of sci-fi, horror, and creature feature. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about Nope this coming award season – it’s that good! In the meantime, if you’re in the Halloween spirit and have a hankering for something spooky, look […]

  On October 30th, 2015, a fire broke out in a popular Bucharest nightclub known as the Colectiv. It was the deadliest fire in Romanian history, killing twenty-six people. In the aftermath of the fire, an additional thirty-seven burn victims died while under hospital care, even though many of them should have survived. So why […]

  Peter Strickland is a British filmmaker with a steadily growing cult following, and with only four features under his belt, he’s established himself as one of the U.K.’s preeminent visual stylists. Strickland’s 2014 film, The Duke of Burgundy, is a relationship drama with a provocative twist and deserves to be discovered by a much […]

  Film editor Alex Camilleri is a Maltese-American who grew up in Minnesota. Beginning at a very young age he dreamt about making a movie that takes place in Malta. His career path lead to collaborations with director Ramin Bahrani, first as an assistant editor for Bahrani’s criminally underseen 2014 film, 99 Homes, then as […]

  There’s something vaguely amusing about the title of the new indie film, Emily the Criminal. It almost sounds like the type of children’s book that Samuel L Jackson might read to his little ones. But Emily the Criminal is nothing if not serious. Aubrey Plaza, best known for comedic roles, is cast against type as […]

  Jordan Peele is one of the most original filmmakers working today. His latest feature, Nope, with a title referenced within the film as shorthand for “No effing way,” is that rare Hollywood beast perilously close to extinction – a summer spectacular that isn’t a sequel or part of a franchise. Peele has a talent […]

  With his 2009 film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino indulged in familiar pet themes of loyalty, retribution, and skewed moral rectitude. What changed was the genre he chose as his canvas, the World War II movie. But his talent for subverting genre conventions was at its peak. Inglourious Basterds has no battalions or exploding artillery; […]

  Modern zombie flicks began with the 1968 George Romero classic, Night of the Living Dead. Comedies were soon to follow. Minor classics such as The Return of the Living Dead and Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive excelled at gross-out humor. But Shaun of The Dead, directed by Edgar Wright and released in 2004, is the […]

  Movie award season is inherently ephemeral. Even diehard film buffs would be hard pressed to recall all of the winners at this year‘s Oscar ceremony, let alone the nominees, and the nominations for Best International Feature seem to fade from memory the quickest. One little slice of movie nirvana in danger of being soon […]

  Attempting a remake of a great movie is more often than not a fool’s errand. You can forgive some filmmakers for trying to share their fanboy obsessions with a new generation, like Peter Jackson did with King Kong or Steven Spielberg with West Side Story. It’s not as easy to forgive those who try […]

  If you are a horror film aficionado, chances are you’ve heard of Julia Ducournau, whose 2016 breakout movie, Raw, became an instant cult hit. Despite its mutilations and cannibalism, Ducournau used Raw to explore benevolent themes such as family and love. With her long-awaited second feature, Titane, Ducournau takes a look at the same themes […]

  With its smart writing and edgy storytelling, The Worst Person in the World towers above the vast majority of romantic comedies. It’s also the third of the so-called Oslo Trilogy written and directed by the Norwegian filmmaker, Joachim Trier. Millennial angst and relationship challenges are their primary through lines, but each film is a […]

  In 2017, Kenneth Branagh directed the opulent Murder on the Orient Express, the first in a planned series based on the Agatha Christie novels. Now he has brought the sequel, Death on the Nile, to the screen, reprising his role as Hercule Poirot, with Tom Bateman returning as Poirot’s friend Bouc. The film opens […]

    George Clooney, tv dreamboat turned elder statesman of cinema is back in the director’s chair for The Tender Bar, a sensitive tale of surviving childhood. This is Clooney’s first directing effort since 2020’s The Midnight Sky, the science fiction fable in  which he also played the lead, an aging scientist as lonely hero. […]

  Being the Ricardos, the latest film from wordsmith-turned-filmmaker Aaron Sorkin, wastes no time reminding us that long before our so-called New Golden Age of Television, the 1950’s sitcom, I Love Lucy, had, at its peak, sixty million viewers. A quick Google search reveals close to three-quarters of all American households with television sets tuned […]