While experience tells me that I should already be leery of whatever Alexander Payne does for a followup act, I sure did enjoy his latest a lot.

If you know in advance that writer/director Sofia Coppola's latest film is going to cover the life of Priscilla Presley from the week of her introduction to Elvis to the day she walked out of Graceland for good, and also know that only one performer is going to play the role from ages 14 through 27, your first sight of Priscilla lead Cailee Spaeny might come as a shock.

While I didn't share my nine-year-old friend's enthusiasm, writer/director Emma Tammi's outing just may be the ideal horror-movie introduction for pre-teens – though if you catch it at our local cineplex, I might advise skipping the trailers.

It's routinely said that what matters isn't the actual length of a movie, but rather how long a movie feels. Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese's genre-blending tale of systemic murder set in early-20th-century Oklahoma, runs just slightly under three-and-a-half hours. Unlike Scorsese's 2019 The Irishman, however, which lasted about five minutes longer, his latest epic crime drama feels like three-and-a-half hours.

I never imagined that the sensational Asteroid City would merely rank as Wes Anderson's fifth-finest achievement of 2023.

I so should've known better, but I was really looking forward to The Exorcist: Believer, and for the simple reason that the trailer creeped me the eff out.

In past Octobers over the years, the professional dancers of Ballet Quad Cities have treated audiences to different takes on Dracula, a disco-themed Halloween party, and even, in 2015, an original murder mystery. But the company's fans will be getting an entire smorgasbord of hauntingly beautiful vignettes in this year's Ghost Stories, with the menu for the October 13 and 14 performances at Moline's Spotlight Theatre including werewolves, spirits, a famous horseman without a head, and bewitching women whose own menu consists of human flesh. Yes, it's suitable for kids.

For a movie plastered wall-to-wall with visual effects, writer/director Gareth Edwards' The Creator pulls off a feat only a few futuristic science-fiction films have managed over the decades: It makes you completely forget about the visual effects.

Because the competition is so fierce, it's hard to say which scene in director Scott Waugh's action sequel Expend4bles is the most repellent. And for the sake of time and our collective sanity, I'm going to ignore every multitudinous instance of brains being splattered via gunfire, the effects for which look like they were added post-production with a red magic marker.

Is it possible that, regarding his previous Hercule Poirot mysteries, Kenneth Branagh not only read critiques of those films, but actively took their criticisms to heart?

Pages