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[Get the exclusive video version of these weekly reviews each Friday by becoming a paid subscriber!] My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, September 11th, 2026. 1) PRACTICAL MAGIC 2 I should probably admit right up front that I am definitely not the audience for Practical Magic 2, because I hated the original Practical Magic when it came out in 199

Sleeping can be scary. It really can. We think of sleep as the safest part of the day: you climb into bed, turn out the lights, close your eyes and basically surrender control of your body and your brain for six, seven or eight hours. At least that's what you're supposed to do. And that's exactly what makes it such fertile ground for horror. You are unconscious, vulnerable, unable to see what's happening around you, unable to control what your mind is showing you and, dependi

There are certain actors and actresses whose names in the credits immediately make me more interested in whatever I'm about to watch. I don't really need to know the plot. I don't need to know who directed it. I don't necessarily need to know whether the movie is any good. If Rebecca Hall is in it, I'm interested. I think Rebecca Hall is one of the best actresses on the planet. She's one of those performers who brings intelligence, gravity and credibility to everything she do

[Get the exclusive video version of these weekly reviews each Friday by becoming a paid subscriber!] My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review four new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, September 4th, 2026. 1) BY ANY MEANS By Any Means is a very puzzling movie. It is also a pretty bad one, but not exactly in the ways I expected it to be bad. This is a would-be historical crime thriller set in M

[Get the exclusive video version of these weekly reviews each Friday by becoming a paid subscriber!] My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review seven new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, August 28th, 2026. 1) COYOTE VS. ACME Like so many people, I grew up on Looney Tunes. I watched them constantly on television as a kid in the '70s, saw many of those cartoons in theaters, and those characters b

I love Anthony Bourdain. I should probably just say that right up front. There are certain people you admire because they're talented, certain people whose work entertains you, and then occasionally there are people who genuinely change the way you look at the world. Anthony Bourdain was one of those people for me. I thought he was funny, brilliant, profane, adventurous, incredibly well-read, brutally honest and completely original. He was a chef, an author, a traveler, a tel