Night Patrol (now on Shudder) mashes up L.A. cops-vs.-gangsters drama with supernatural horror-thrillers with enough ambition and vision to compel you to admire it. Director/co-writer Ryan Prows graduates from indie passion projects (2017’s Lowlife) to […]
John Serba
71 posts
As if Charlize Theron hadn’t been through enough already in Australia, Apex (now on Netflix) puts the Mad Max: Fury Road star in deep doodoo, deep in the bush. The versatile actor – kinda recently […]
Park Chan-wook’s exhilaratingly bonkers No Other Choice (now streaming on Hulu, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) adds to the primary theme of film in 2025: It was the year of bewilderment. […]
You’ve gotta say this for the guy – Marty Supreme (now streaming on HBO Max, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) lives in the moment. This nerve-shredding Timothee Chalamet vehicle exists to […]
With The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (now on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), filmmaker Daniel Roher – co-directing with Charlie Tyrell – may be searching for the silver lining around […]
Ian Tuason’s debut feature Undertone (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) being the latest example of how the horror genre is a breeding ground for high-ceiling filmmakers. The modestly innovative creeper stars […]
Reminders of Him (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is the new entry in the Pronoun Cinematic Universe, following 2024’s hit It Ends With Us and 2025’s lesser hit (but still pretty […]
To walk into The Napa Boys (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) blind is to be bewildered. Don’t worry, though – I’m here for you, to explain that such bewilderment is intentional, […]
The partnership of a groundbreaking comedy duo gets the nostalgia-documentary treatment in Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie (now streaming on Paramount+). Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are ubiquitous with stoner comedy, and were the first […]
A Letterboxd review lines up Vengeance (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) in its sights and killshots it: “Juan Wick,” it reads. We could all stop right there and go on with our lives, but […]
The GOAT meets regular old goats – well, quasi-Satanic regular old goats, anyway – in Him (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a nasty slab of satirical horror […]
Much more than just a simple revenge thriller, South African film 180 (now on Netflix) plays out in the gray areas of morality and legality. Alex Yazbek writes and directs this thoughtfully rendered story of […]
Dust Bunny (now streaming on HBO Max) marks Bryan Fuller’s rather audacious jump from television to film. The creator of Pushing Daisies, Hannibal and numerous Star Trek series wrote and directed this all-style-all-the-time way-offbeat uncategorizable […]
IBATS (Inspired By A True Story) movie Sarah’s Oil (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is of a far more tolerable brand of biopic. Instead of telling the story of a well-known sports, musical or […]
Balls Up (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is a Peter Farrelly-directed comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser as condom salesmen. That sentence alone will determine if you’re in or out on this […]
The 1994 assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio gets revisited by a streamer – once again – in three-part Spanish-language documentary series Colosio: Political Assassination (now streaming on HBO Max). A bit of […]
Feel My Voice is a true Netflix product, an Italian version of a film that’s already been made in two other languages: The original is La Famille Belier, the French story from 2014. The other […]
Netflix once again shows its platforming power by elevating a forgotten/never-remembered-in-the-first-place generic Lifetime original into the Netflix Top 10: Gaslit by My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story is a true-crime-adjacent BOATS (Based On A True […]
The Bride! (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is destined to be the most… something… film of 2026. Batshit? Misguided? All-over-the-place? Incoherent? Singular? Weirdly entertaining? Fascinating? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes […]
If I Can’t Have You (now streaming on Peacock) is one of those odd in-betweeners of the streaming era, a TV-MA erotic thriller that keeps the erotic thrills in the PG-13 zone and, minus a […]
Outcome (now streaming on Apple TV+) finds star Keanu Reeves and co-star/director/writer Jonah Hill toying with their personae and the complicated Hollywood business in which they work. In telling this story about a superstar actor […]
Thrash (now on Netflix) could’ve been titled Sharkicane, but it’s clear that B-movie director Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow, Violent Night) wants to differentiate his flick from less-serious fare. Not that this disaster/shark attack hybrid thriller […]
Sirat (now streaming on Hulu) is the most unforgettable, and possibly unforgiving, film of 2025. Oliver Laxe’s gruelingly suspenseful dramatic thriller introduced the French-born Galician director’s work to his largest audience yet – previous films […]
Steven Kostanski’s Deathstalker remake (now streaming on Shudder) is 35 percent snot. It’s likely the gloopiest, goriest movie to splatter across your screen in years. If beheadings were currency, Deathstalker would be Elon Musk. If […]
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (now streaming on Peacock, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) posits an impossible question: What if someone had the balls to make a movie that’s even worse […]
It Takes a Village is the hotly-anticipated-by-someone-out-there sequel to the 2024 Polish romantic comedy No Pressure, so that means Netflix has performed the surely elaborate ceremony to initiate the “No Pressure Collection” into the hallowed […]
The Giant Falls is the fourth Netflix movie in five years from Argentinian director Marcos Carnevale. And par for the course with the uberstreamer’s reputation for cranking out blandly watchable mediocrities, they’ve all been modestly […]
Jonah Hill is 42 and Michael Cera is 37 so Pizza Movie (now streaming on Hulu) indoctrinates their successors, Stranger Things alum Gaten Matarazzo and The Goldbergs star Sean Giambrone. The two young funnydudes anchor […]
Hey Netflix – we need to talk about these movie titles. I mean, Eat Pray Bark? Really? Maybe that’s better than the direct German translation, Therapy on Four Paws, although that’s marginal, and arguable. I […]
Avatar: Fire and Ash (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) proved that the world may be getting a touch weary of James Cameron’s megablockbuster franchise. Sure, we don’t mind another opportunity to […]
I expected Scream 7 (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) to test my capacity for meta-movie references, but it ended up testing my patience. To the breaking point. Neve Campbell (back after […]
The title Crime 101 (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) implies something stripped-down and basic, and in a sense, it is – we’ve seen plenty of intricate cops-and-robbers neo-noir action-dramas like this. But films of […]
Sydney Sweeney plays an ex-con in a snug tank top in The Housemaid (now streaming on Starz, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), but whether the movie lives up to the pulpy […]
So are we drinking the Wuthering Heights (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) bathwater, or are we scowling at it in disgust? That’s the question of the day, my friends. Hot-button filmmaker […]
It’s not wabbit season or duck season these days – it’s shark season, shark MOVIE season to be precise, and Dangerous Animals (now streaming on Hulu, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) […]
More Ralph Fiennes, more Iron Maiden, more brain-eating – 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) just ran away with my heart. The […]
Anemone (now on Netflix) was monumental for one reason: the return of Daniel Day-Lewis. And here I pause to list the greatest works of our greatest living thespian in an incantation to ward off bad […]
53 Sundays (now on Netflix) presents the burning question: How many bickering siblings does it take to change a lightbulb? That’s not a joke or a metaphor but a literalism in Spanish director Cesc Gay’s […]
The (sigh) Twisted Childhood Universe marches on with Bambi: The Reckoning (now streaming on Peacock), another LOOK MA, I’M SUBVERSIVE! riff on kiddie-content faves that recently hit the public domain. Now, there’s something to be […]
Keep your hand poised over the tissue box while you watch Versa (now streaming on Disney+), a profoundly heartfelt animated short that’s just as heartrending. It’s written and directed by Malcon Pierce, a Disney animator […]
The official title of Ballerina (now streaming on HBO Max, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, so as to prevent unwitting travelers from taking […]
From the Time Travel Movies Make My Head Hurt File comes Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice (now streaming on Hulu), a genre-smusher-together starring Vince Vaughn, Eiza Gonzalez, James Marsden and Vince Vaughn again. […]
Animated anthropomorphic-animal family comedy GOAT (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) puns on the modern parlance of sports, casting an actual literal goat as the Greatest Of All Time. Except he’s not […]
Southeast Asia is home to a robust internet and telephone scam network, and The Red Line (now on Netflix) uses that real-life context as the basis for suspenseful drama. Thai director Sitisiri Mongkolsiri – who […]
Pretty Lethal (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) banks heavily on the irony of its core premise: Young-woman ballet dancers who go from cabriole to watch-the-blood-spray after they’re held captive by ugly goons. This isn’t […]
Paul Rudd and Jack Black plays guys remaking Anaconda in this remake of Anaconda, appropriately titled Anaconda (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video). Got that? So, Today I […]
Grisly-fun Sam Raimi comedy-thriller Send Help (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) finds star Rachel McAdams altering her screen persona from mean girl to mousy and back. She’s the put-upon employee at […]
Joachim Trier does the near-impossible with Sentimental Value (now streaming on Hulu, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video): direct a worthy follow-up to his 2021 triumph The Worst Person in the World. […]