The screenlife subgenre is officially enshittified thanks to Mercy (now on Amazon Prime Video), an empty-skulled thriller that gives us the deeply unstimulating pleasure of watching Chris Pratt sit in a chair for 90 minutes, […]
John Serba
71 posts
Purists will bellow BLASPHEMY at The Garfield Movie (now streaming on Hulu, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) while proponents of personal progress may hail it for pushing the title cat character […]
The Bad Guys 2 (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) picks up right where its predecessor left off: What if the titular guys are no longer the titular […]
Sisu: Road to Revenge (now on Netflix) is Planes, Trains and Automobiles gone psychotically violent, Tom and Jerry if it actually showed blood and Mad Max: Fury Road on, well, a sliver of the budget. […]
Will Arnett faced a major challenge with Is This Thing On? (now streaming on Hulu, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video): Can one of the funniest people in the world play a […]
Your appreciation for Wicked: For Good (now streaming on Peacock, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) may hinge on how well you tolerate significant retconning of the greatest musical fantasy film of […]
A beloved TV series returns, concludes and gestures to the future with Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (now on Netflix), the feature-length film that wraps the original BBC run with star Cillian Murphy, and puts […]
A viral TikTok meme becomes a feature-length movie in Terri Jo: Missionary in Miami, a Tubi original that brings a next-gen dude-in-drag comedy off an app and to, well, a different app. In 2022, comedian […]
Country Doctor (now streaming on HBO Max) is among a handful of exceedingly well-done, relevant and topical documentaries produced and released by HBO in the last year. This 38-minute short from veteran documentary directors Nick […]
Orlando Bloom rebels against his Rather Handsome Gent image with The Cut (now streaming on Paramount+), in which he plays an aging boxer trying to lose far too much weight in far too little time […]
Director Jeffrey McHale crams a whole lotta stuff into It’s Dorothy! (now streaming on Peacock). This deep-dive documentary about the pop-cultural cache of The Wizard of Oz’s iconic protagonist interviews Dorothy actors and a cross-section […]
In my daily-newspaper days we called it “news you can use” – the type of documentaries Netflix occasionally turns out, tackling health, consumerism and other practical realities, e.g., The Plastic Detox. This one is about […]
The full extent of Channing Tatum’s charismatic powers fuel Roofman (now streaming on Prime Video, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a somewhat stranger-than-fiction BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie about […]
It’s once again time for a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie with actual boats in it, namely, Not Without Hope (now streaming on Paramount+). Joe Carnahan (The Rip) directs this gritty thriller adapting […]
Anniversary (now on Hulu) takes place in absolute Hell: a Thanksgiving dinner table populated by conservatives and progressives. But this being The Movies, it’s not just any conservative, it’s the leader of a new totalitarian […]
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (now you see it Starz, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is the third in a series of films that are low-key on track to […]
The never not-lovable Bob Odenkirk resumes kicking major tuckus in Nobody 2 (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), the sequel to 2021’s highly entertaining average-guy-goes-HAM sockeroo cult-hit action […]
Director Gore Verbinski (Rango, three Pirates of the Caribbeans) returns to the fray after a decade of dormancy, helming satirical sci-fi whatnotter Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon […]
Is The Testament of Ann Lee (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) the grimmest musical ever put on film? Credit director Mona Fastvold – who co-wrote The Brutalist with Brady Corbet, who […]
Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare (now streaming on HBO Max) debuts 15 years to the day since the world’s second-worst nuclear power plant catastrophe occurred, and to paraphrase one of the documentary’s talking heads, it’s about […]
Primitive War (now streaming on Hulu) stops just shy of putting tyrannosaurs in F14s, which is kind of a shame, really. But Australian director Luke Sparke puts them and a raft of other dinosaurs in […]
The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs and Who Has Control (now on Paramount+) has the potential to be a doozy of a Capitalism Movie. Director Aisling Chin-Yee’s documentary tells the long, winding story of filbanserin, a.k.a. […]
One Piece: Season 2 is absolutely one of Netflix’s most highly anticipated releases of 2026. The streamer’s trend of high-profile anime-adaptation flops like Cowboy Bebop and Death Note came to a welcome end when One […]