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There have been other less-than-super Marvel movies before this latest one. Remember the dreadful "Eternals"? Or the only slightly less awful "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"? Remember not long ago when whispers of "superhero fatigue" started making the rounds? The new "Captain America: Brave New World" is a reminder that the Marvel Cinematic...Read more

"Love Hurts" is yet another helping of Valentine's Day product that doesn't put enough new comic spin on its purported subject. It's essentially an action flick intended to turn its star, Ke Huy Quan, into a full-fledged romantic lead. Anyone who remembers Quan as the fast-talking Short Round ("Hold on to your potatoes!") in Steven Spielberg's ...Read more

Josh and Iris meet cute in the fruit section of a supermarket, beaming at each other over crates of melons and carefully stacked mounds of oranges. Later, looking back in a retrospective voiceover, Iris tells us this initial encounter was one of those magical moments you might experience just once in a lifetime. However, "For me it happened ...Read more

"Presence" is like an old "Paranormal Activity" movie told from the point of view of the paranormal entity. This is not immediately apparent. The movie opens with darting interior shots of a luxe suburban house in Anywhere USA (actually New Jersey). The camera, operated, as is often the case in his movies, by director Steven Soderbergh, whips us...Read more

"Better Man" is an astonishing movie about the internationally renowned pop star Robbie Williams. You may not be familiar with this hyper-famous Englishman, because, to what I think we can assume to be his enduring puzzlement, he is famously un-famous in one crucial anglophone music market -- the United States. And so releasing a $110-million ...Read more

There's never been a shortage of people who dismiss Bob Dylan as a lousy singer. Or no singer at all, even.

"Critics have been giving me a hard time since day one," Dylan said in 2015. "Critics say I can't sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don't critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? ... Why do I get special treatment?"

In an uncanny...Read more

At the age of 41, director Robert Eggers is right at home by now living in the past. Eggers set his first feature, "The Witch" -- a film in which many people first laid eyes on Anya Taylor-Joy -- in New England in the 1630s. His second picture, "The Lighthouse," examined the cranky interactions of flame-tenders Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson ...Read more

America in the 1970s and '80s was for some reason fruitful ground for wing-nut racial psychopaths and frothing antisemites. These people cursed their oppression by ZOG -- the "Zionist Occupation Government" -- and yearned loudly for the extermination of Jews and Blacks and, basically, anyone else who wasn't them. Their literary taste, such as it...Read more

We're all Team Pamela now; how could we not be? Pamela Anderson's story, with its sunny, sexy, dream-come-true beginning and its darkening, porn-come-true trajectory, could have been anybody's bumpy trip.

It hasn't all been awful, of course. Anderson was a little Canadian kid who came to the States, blossomed into a hot number in Playboy ...Read more

What is yacht rock, anyway? Is it even rock and roll? In the new HBO documentary "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary," Mac DeMarco, a professional entertainer who you'd figure would know, says the genre "exists in a certain zone. It's not that it doesn't rock, but it doesn't rock too hard." Comic Fred Armisen, who wrote the intro for Greg Prato'...Read more

The year 2000 was a very good one for Ridley Scott. The director's neo-swords-and-sandals epic "Gladiator," released in May of that year, went on to gross some $451 million at the worldwide box office -- real money in those days. And when the next batch of Oscars was handed out, "Gladiator," nominated for 12 of them, took home five, including ...Read more