“House of Games” is not badly acted. It is acting from a universe where showing a feeling is how the money leaves the room.

“Psycho Killer” feels like someone had a good mask and then tried to grow a movie around it in a tray.

Most robot uprising stories end at the moment of maximum catastrophe. The servers go dark, the missiles fly, the last human falls. _I Am Mother_ opens in the aftermath and asks the question no one else in the genre seems interested in: so now what?

The men in this movie treat the women like furniture that occasionally talks back. I know that comes with the territory when you’re watching a film from 1929, and I try to meet old movies on their own terms, but The Broadway Melody kept pulling me out of itself.

With “Her,” Jonze writes romance as one-sided as his own failed marriage and it’s wonderful.

Why does everybody like this movie more than I do? I mean, I gave it 4 stars. It’s beautiful. But it’s a boring beautiful. I don’t know anything anymore.

This is Siri and Alexa and all the AIs and it clearly means engineers were reading pulp computer house books and watching these movies and taking notes on how to kill us all long before I could turn off the lights with my voice.

It’s not about the intelligence that will displace us and rule the world. It’s about the intelligence that lives inside a washing machine and the huge heart it carries.

Ryan Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man is the first Benoit Blanc mystery that doesn’t feel like it’s having any fun—and that’s exactly the point. In a locked church where faith and certainty have been weaponized in equal measure, Johnson uses the playful locked-room structure to examine something deeply uncomfortable: the way we perform certainty in the face of doubt.

Nearly a century on, The Phantom of the Opera feels both monumental and deeply uneven at the same time. It’s the kind of early studio