It’s been twelve long years since Starz’ “Spartacus” ended on a brutal and glorious high note, and after two years since it was initially announced, the show’s first spin-off series is finally here. Unlike many prequels or sequels, “Spartacus: The House of Ashur” takes place in an alternate future where the titular character (played by

Michael Pantozzi’s “Off The Face of the Earth” opens with a reclusive photographer, Tim (Pantozzi), who struggles to find the courage to delete his social media account. Once he does that, will he truly be alone and perhaps freer? Or is he trying to take a stand against being a product that exists only to

In November, the time change hits hard, not just in places that observe Daylight Saving Time. The darkness seems to creep in earlier and earlier every day, everywhere, as we barrel towards the end of the year. The city of Tallinn, Estonia, embraces this darkness as a virtue. Each year in November, they host the

In the fall of 1981, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel fell in love with two men named Andre and Wally, and they told the world about it, thereby saving a tiny, eccentric, beguiling movie from a fast fade into commercial oblivion. I went to that movie, as did a few hundred thousand or more other

Earlier this year, I had the chance to sit in Chicago’s venerable Music Box Theatre and watch a 25th anniversary screening of “In the Mood for Love,” the masterful and visually ravishing exploration of romantic yearning from Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai that became an instant classic from the moment it first screened in 2000.

Nathan Johnson composed the score for Rian Johnson’s three “Knives Out” mysteries, but with each one, they start from scratch. While the character of master detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, has to solve a murder mystery with a colorful range of interconnected suspects in all three movies, each is a distinct genre, and

Between the ages of 3 and 5, I fell in love with the movies after seeing my very first one, learned how to read and write, and discovered there was actually a job out there that combined all of those things into one: A film critic. From that point on, I knew what I wanted

My eighth-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Hughes. She always told us not to be a bump on a log if she saw that we weren’t using our energy to its full potential. I thought she’d coined the phrase until we read S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders as a class. It’s right there on the fourth

Before I was a friend and colleague, I was a fan. In my early and mid-teens in the 1970s, I was a loner jock/pop culture nerd who was obsessed with these pursuits: Playing and watching baseball and football and to a lesser extent basketball, and consuming issues of Sports Illustrated and Sport and Baseball Digest,

A profoundly moving portrait of a family reckoning with the painful memories embedded deep within the walls of their ancestral home, Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” finds the filmmaker reflecting once more on the existential themes—of time, love, identity, and history—that have abounded throughout his career. The film reunites Trier with Renate Reinsve, a Norwegian actress