In 2011, Roger Ebert wrote a short piece about the impossible-to-classify performer Tiny Tim, whose peak of fame probably was getting married on “The Tonight Show” in 1969, an event that made headlines around the world, receiving ratings second only to Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon just five months prior. In his piece, Ebert…

“Together Together” is not just smart, it’s sneaky-smart. You go into it thinking you know what you’re getting yourself into, and feeling impatient or dismissive as a result, because the movie conspicuously makes choices that seem designed to announce which boxes it’s going to check off. Then it keeps confounding you—in a way that’s understated rather than…

Almost 30 years after “Mortal Kombat” changed the fighting game landscape forever, a reboot to the film franchise based on these brutally violent games arrives in theaters and on HBO Max for 30 days. Here’s the important thing for fans to know: it’s as R-rated as the games themselves. For the first time really, the…

For a while in the post-“Twilight,” post-“The Hunger Games” days, YA adaptations were a dime a dozen. Too many novels followed a generic “Superpowers revealed, true selves explored” template, with female protagonists often mired in love triangles that obfuscated their own character development. Plots were simultaneously overly complicated and fairly predictable, and the dystopia setting…

Few characters in the history of horror fiction, or any kind of fiction for that matter, have remained as iconic as Frankenstein’s monster. Ghoulish in its concoction but pitiable in its existence, the creature forces us to question the ethics of science run amok, the mortal nature of life, and mankind’s seemingly innate disgust at…

Three years ago, director Joe Penna and his co-writer, Ryan Morrison, made their feature filmmaking debut with “Arctic,” a spare survival story starring a snowbound Mads Mikkelsen awaiting rescue. The film was gripping in its understatement and use of silence—it was practically dialogue-free—and a riveting exercise in exploring the detailed minutiae of human nature. Having…