Movies

As you may have heard, "Bros," the first gay rom-com from a major studio to feature an out queer cast, bombed on its opening weekend. At just $4.8 million in sales, it came in fourth. This despite the robust marketing campaign and the Judd Apatow seal of approval. Given the fanfare going into opening weekend, there's no other way to describe it other than a flop.

Halloween preview: 'Don't Look at the Demon'

"A lot of this actually happened" is the opening epigram of "Amsterdam," David O. Russell's kaleidoscopic riff on the curious case of Gen. Smedley Butler, who in 1933 became involved in what would be known as the Business Plot, wherein he was allegedly approached by a cabal of wealthy business executives to be the figurehead for an attempted coup in which they were planning to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

EWU Visiting Writer Markus reads at Auntie's tonight

What’s new for home viewing on Video on Demand and Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

For a Halloween preview, see two horror classics

'Bros,' 'Good House' usher in the fall with romance

The true-crime cottage industry that exploded in the years following "Serial," the podcast that became a cultural phenomenon in 2014, is inherently exploitative - even when the work in question has an ostensibly noble mission. In the case of "Serial," the mission was to find out whether an innocent man had been convicted of a murder he long maintained he did not commit. But even as the "This American Life" spinoff inspired fervent interest in Adnan Syed's 2000 conviction for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, it has also received criticism for what - and whom - it left out.

Remember back when alcoholism was a punchline?"The Good House" doesn't exactly hark back to the days of comic Foster Brooks, whose broadly slapstick "drunk" act was a comedy staple of the 1970s, but Sigourney Weaver's portrayal of a woman with a drinking problem in the film is for the most part too cute for comfort.

Writer/director Parker Finn’s feature debut “Smile” boasts the thinnest of premises based on a laundry list of horror movie trends and tropes, from the historical to the contemporary. Based on his 2020 short film “Laura Hasn’t Slept,” Finn inserts the latest hot topic in horror — trauma — into a story structured around a death curse chain, as seen in films like “The Ring,” “It Follows” and “She Dies Tomorrow.” All that’s needed to pass along the curse is a mere smile, but it’s the kind of chin-lowered, eyes-raised toothy grin that communicates something far more devious than friendly.

In your nightmares, it doesn't help to 'Smile'

From page to screen: 'Railway Children' ... again

In advance of Halloween candy comes 'The Clackity'

Written entirely in Salish, filmmaker Ryan Abrahamson’s latest work is an audio-video echo of the past. Loosely based on the legend of Devil’s Gap, the story came to Abrahamson like a poem.

The advance hype for “Don’t Worry Darling” has been so incessant – from director Olivia Wilde’s location-turned-relationship with her leading man, Harry Styles, to a Kabuki-like feud with her lead actress, Florence Pugh, and something involving Chris Pine and Styles at the recent Venice Film Festival – that it’s easy to forget there’s an actual movie at the center of it all. A movie that’s not a disaster, but not particularly distinguished; a movie that, in the end, will wind up being as forgettable as its own bizarre publicity.