Directors can do several different things with movies. For some reason scary stories work really well in the medium. Horror movies don’t usually cost all that much to make. And there is a dedicated audience for them.

The lobby at the local AMC looked a lot different than usual last week, as a “girls’ night out” preview of a new release brought hordes of women to the theater.

His daughter directed “The Watchers,” a frustrating film we saw earlier this summer. So now M. Night Shyamalan, who produced that movie, has a new feature of his own out, “Trap.” Shyamalan fans turned out in large numbers to see the movie its first weekend.

Here’s the biggest upset of the cinematic year: the latest “Deadpool” movie isn’t much fun to watch. “Deadpool and Wolverine,” starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and a speaking cast of perhaps 100, has some jokes that work. But its main business is to satirize the super hero movie “multiv…

Hollywood hasn’t offered us very many new “romantic comedies” recently. There is a new one showing at the local 13-plex, director Greg Berlanti’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” We think it qualifies as a rom com. The movie does have a man and woman attracted to each other. Is it a problem that there …

Kansas novelist Rex Stout had his character Nero Wolfe argue that there is a difference, in the arts, between imagination and invention. The new film “A Quiet Place: Day One” offers a chance for us to consider what he means.

There’s something about the fourth “Bad Boys” movie, “Ride or Die,” that makes it seem fitting that the picture premiered in Dubai. Not much Miami Deco in the style of this Bruckheimer production. The ideal here is more Persian Gulf than Gulf of Mexico.

George Miller’s “Mad Max” movies are always part Homer and part Jethro. This is especially true with the fifth and latest installment in the series, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” And at 148 minutes (plus trailers), the movie just about has the bulk to qualify as a saga.

“The Garfield Movie” is about a fat orange cat who visually resembles the one in the comic strips printed in this newspaper. But it isn’t the same cat. The one in the animated film is an action hero. The one in the strip doesn’t like to move around much.

An excellent limited series just concluded its run last weekend. While it might require a little maneuvering to get the right streaming options, it’s well worth the price and effort.

John Krasinski has proved to be a show business survivor. He began directing episodes of “The Office” when he was one of the stars of the American version of that tv series. He played Jack Ryan in the Amazon Prime series based on Tom Clancy’s spy stories.

While the construction going on around the local theater may make it look like a fortress, summer movie season is here, and there are plenty of reasons to head to the cinema in the next three months.

Don’t expect the new film “Boy Kills World” to mean anything. It is one of a wave of fighting movies with producers trying to capitalize on what they think they’ve learned from the surprise popularity of the “John Wick” films. And that’s about all it is.

Since Dolly the sheep’s cloning in 1996, the new movie “Immaculate” was probably inevitable. Most of us already knew of the other half of the equation. Items associated with and even some bones supposedly remaining from saints have been displayed in European churches which then benefit from …

There is a new, fifth “Ghostbusters” movie in theaters now. It is called “Frozen Empire.” But then, it could have been called almost anything.

One comes away from a showing of “Dune 2” not unhappy. It tells a rigorously classic story. It has scope and imagery. Some of the action sequences are enjoyable. Director Denis Villeneuve has also done a much better job of telling a story than he did in “Dune,” his 2021 movie, the third base…

I recommend the new movie “American Fiction.” As the film’s Oscar nominations suggest, this is a terrific picture — funny, heart-felt, dramatic, intelligent, well-paced and featuring some fine acting. Plus, it’s entertaining.

Movie fans who go in to see “Night Swim,” the latest Blumhouse horror movie, get one treat. Starring as the mother is Kerry Condon. The Irish actress is a genuine talent, as Royal Shakespeare Company patrons and the folks who watched “Better Call Saul” know.

Movie director Michael Mann is up and down, but he is so good at his best (“Collateral” for example) that film fans find it difficult to let his movies come and go unseen. In the case of his new offering, “Ferrari,” Mann has Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz to rely on, and they are pretty depen…

One of the many victims of our historically self-righteous politics and of the mental re-orientation associated with the virus lock-down has been the Romantic Comedy film. Until recently a stock Hollywood offering, the rom com has been missing from movie screens for a surprisingly long time now.

Roald Dahl wrote “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda,” “James and the Giant Peach,” “The B.F.G.,” and “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Many know this. But how many know he was a World War II “ace” fighter pilot in the R.A.F.? And a “Wing-Commander”?

The interested may be getting a notion of how the long re-build of arts and entertainment, which were decimated by the lock-down, is going to go.

Every once in a while, one of the odd, often fantastic recent movies starring Nicholas Cage turns out to be important and disturbing as well as laugh-out-loud funny. “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” and “Renfield,” for example, are among the best dozen movies released in the last tw…

“The Marvels” is not a bad movie, but folks who haven’t been avid fans of the Marvel-comics run of action pictures are going to want to throw their popcorn at the screen during the first reel.

Eli Roth’s new horror film “Thanksgiving” really is scary. Not always. Sometimes it is tense. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to have any forward motion. But generally speaking, this is the the first horror movie we’ve seen in months that will have audience members squirming in their seats.

Netflix throws a lot of money at some great filmmakers, but most of the returns are deeply unsatisfying.

The horribly-edited “Killers of the Flower Moon” was a 2017 best-selling book about Oklahoma history. David Grann (a New Yorker staffer who earlier wrote the book “Lost City of Z”) wrote about the last of the Wild West days in the new state —Oklahoma entered the union in 1907.

The Exorcist films have been higher class horror movies than the general run of October cinematic tinglers. The new one, and apparently the sixth one depending on how you count, is “The Exorcist: Believer.” The movie was directed by David Gordon Green and brings back Ellen Burstyn as Chris M…

Despite its length, “Creator” never did get around to boring its audience. The new sci-fi movie has enough plot turns and enough beautiful images (mostly of rice paddies and corn) that people don’t have many chances to get distracted.

Richard Branaugh, the now veteran actor and director, has been making feature film versions of Agatha Christie’s detective story novels for six years, I believe. Having knocked off “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile,” he now turns to a less well-known book, “Halloween Party.”

For those of us with a little exposure in the past to the Edward Woodward “Equalizer” TV series or to the later “Equalizer” films starring Denzel Washington, or probably for those who have watched the more recent TV series with Queen Latifah as the retired CIA agent the Italian settings in t…

There’s a new movie about Dracula. It’s called “Last Voyage of the Demeter.” Here’s some of its story.

“Barbie” met every expectation I had and retaught me not only to be more comfortable in my own skin but to be more comfortable with my femininity.

Christopher Nolan doesn’t need to prove he can direct a good movie. He’s shown that he can tell a story, and a complicated story, in films including “Inception,” “Memento,” “The Prestige,” “Dunkirk,” and the “Dark Knight Trilogy” which begins with “Batman Begins.”

While mine is likely to be a minority reaction to the new live-action movie “Barbie,” it may suggest something that could weaken the proverbial “legs” of this box-office bonanza. See, I’m troubled that I can’t figure out what “Barbie” is about.

The fifth and — they promise — last Indiana Jones movie is “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Now now. Don’t get het up. This isn’t a Bad movie. It isn’t going to do any harm to our memory of the series. And it does give us Harrison Ford one last time.

Four quick notions before we get to the discussion of Dreamworks’ new animated film “Ruby Gillman, Teenaged Kraken.”

Writer and Director Wes Anderson has a new film out. “Asteroid City” is a movie about a TV show about a play, with the television footage shown as black and white and fitting in a square frame. The movie uses whimsical sub-headings and it cuts back and forth between events in the play and el…

Robert Rodriguez has been one of the best filmmakers on earth the last several decades. He has long been associated with Quentin Tarantino. But his latest film, “Hypnotic,” is really more like the work of Christopher Nolan.

Exorcism movies are to the general run of horror pictures what gangster movies are to crime films. They are related to the larger group, but their pay-off is different. Exorcism movies please their audience with ritual and with the larger significance of their issues.

Summer movie season kicks off this weekend, and while there will be plenty of new streaming options this year, nothing beats heading to the theater for a bucket of popcorn and a loud spectacle to get out of the heat.

“What’s the name of that funny cancer?” Hugh Grant’s character asks in the new Guy Ritchie movie, “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre.” Mr. Romantic Comedy is playing an international crime coordinator. And he’s playing him using Michael Caine’s voice.