Joe Leydon

, Brian Loschiavo’s “Bluebird” may be of most interest to casual and/or newly converted country music fans who have occasionally wondered about the songwriters behind the songs. There’s a better th…

Charged with alternating currents of droll wit, sardonic cynicism, and socialist-tinged idealism, writer-director Denys Arcand’s “The Fall of the American Empire” is . Despite the title, the new fi…

Filmmaker Bill Haney obviously figured he required neither flashy technique nor melodramatic hyperbole for “Jim Allison: Breakthrough,” his prosaically straightforward but consistently interesting …

Roger Corman is alive and well and up to his old tricks. At 93, the prodigiously prolific director, producer and mini-major mogul has been in the business long enough to receive scores of lifetime …

Throughout two decades of web-slinging, rebooting, reversals of fortune, immersions into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and sporadic reappearances by the Spidey-hating J. Jonah Jameson, the “Spider-Man” film franchise has been wildly inconsistent, yet remarkably indestructible. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the latest episode, a follow-up to the Oscar-winning animated feature “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (2018), likely […]

For those of you who have always wanted to see Juliette Binoche play a foul-mouthed truck driver — and you know who you are — “Paradise Highway” delivers the goods, and then some. This counterintui…

Despite some ambitious efforts by director Jessica M. Thompson and screenwriter Blair Butler to revitalize hoary horror movie tropes with allegorical commentary on race, class and male privilege, “…

“High Heat” is a hoot. Though it may sound in synopsis like standard-issue genre fare suitable for quick-serve consumption on digital and streaming platforms, this satisfying mashup of crime thrill…

The “Rocky” series continues apace, even after Rocky himself has thrown in the towel, as Michael B. Jordan returns as Adonis Creed for “Creed III,” the latest installment in what might best be described as a spinoff franchise. How long can this go on? Well, consider this: At the very end of the new film, […]

It’s been a bit more than a year since “Butcher’s Crossing” premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, but the timing of its theatrical release could hardly be more propitious. Director Gabe Polsky’s grimly fatalistic Western has finally arrived at the megaplexes just days after the PBS airing of “The American Buffalo,” Ken Burns’ fascinating (and […]