Author: Kasey Butcher

Some movies I watch and forget. Others make me come home and hit Google. For example, the latest Marvel film, Black Panther, had me looking into Afrofuturism, the fusion of sci-fi, fantasy, speculative fiction and afrocentrism that made Black Panther seem so unique in the superhero genre.

In Black

In 2016, I got to visit The Winchester Mystery House. It was a long-time dream to go see Sarah Winchester’s 160 room mansion outside of San Jose, California, and it far exceeded my expectations. Winchester was the heir to her husband’s wealth earned from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company as

My freshman year of college, a friend and I dressed as Nancy Kerrigan (me) and Tonya Harding (Kathleen) for Halloween. We rollerbladed around campus and parodied a “major”, often-satirized news story from our youth. After watching I, Tonya, I feel like I owe Tonya Harding a bit of an apology.

With the weather turning colder, this month is the perfect time to bundle up and enjoy a good movie. This week, I weigh an option for the theater, a rental and a holiday classic in re-release.

In The Tribes of Palos Verdes, Phil (Justin Kirk) and Sandy Mason (Jennifer Garner) move to Palos Verdes,

In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) grows so frustrated with the police’s lack of progress toward solving her daughter, Angela’s, brutal murder that she buys three billboards just outside of the small town she lives in and posts a blunt message asking

It is not an easy task to create a film about young people that is funny and imaginative while also doing justice to the deep and complicated emotions around making and keeping friends and navigating family dynamics. Wonder delivers on all these elements while also featuring a touching, but not overly-simplified

I normally find the collaboration between the Coen Brothers and George Clooney at least charming, even when the result is lackluster. Their latest film, Suburbicon, however, is so aggressively bad that it was hard to find any redeeming qualities.

Suburbicon is set in the 1950s in Suburbicon, an everytown

Happy Death Day can easily be described as Groundhog Day meets Scream, and at the story’s end it acknowledges its similarity to the Bill Murray comedy, but the movie does not suffer from a lack of creativity. Instead, it adeptly puts a funny, thrilling spin on familiar plots.

In Happy Death Day,

Battle of the Sexes dramatizes the founding of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and their fight for more equal pay for women in professional tennis, leading up to the famous “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell). When the

Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is sure to polarize audiences. Although it looks like a home invasion thriller, the film uses allegory and gore to explore an issue both ancient and timely. I cannot fully express my take on the film without discussing the plot and its interpretation, so if you do not

In a cultural climate fraught with anger, many artists have turned to imagining new versions of the Civil War to work through the issues that face us (i.e. American War or HBO’s Confederate). Bushwick follows Lucy (Brittany Snow) and Stupe (Dave Bautista) as they try to make it to safety and save

Since her days as April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, I have been a fan of Aubrey Plaza’s dark, very dry sense of humor and subtle character work. I’ve enjoyed seeing her in more movies over the past few years, even as they often seem like different shades of the same character. In Ingrid Goes

When I was a kid, I collected dolls with my mother. I loved them, but my brother thought they were creepy, which made me love them just a just a little more. I am not afraid of dolls, but demons really scare me. Annabelle: Creation tells the origin story of the evil doll using many of the same scare

If grief is love with no place to go, then A Ghost Story is a beautiful, self-indulgent, flawed portrait of one man’s love for his wife and his home. A Ghost Story delivers plenty of haunting images, but is so slow and so pretentious, I wanted to walk out a couple of times.

The film focuses on C

It has become a trope for characters in films and television shows to want their lives to play out like romantic comedies (i.e. Mindy on The Mindy Project). It is less common for someone to turn their own love story into a romantic comedy, especially when the result is sweet, hilarious and genuinely

At the end of The Beguiled, as I was thinking, “what did I just watch?”

I heard a man mutter, “That’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen.”

Clearly, this latest film from Sofia Coppola, which earned her Best Director at Cannes, is not going to satisfy everyone. I found it, well, beguiling. It

Wonder Woman was one of the most anticipated movies of the summer, and it lived up to the expectations, both at the box office and in terms of quality. The movie delivered nostalgia without being too corny and presented a fairly nuanced portrait of a heroic woman and her mission to save people from

When I reviewed The Circle, I suggested that the book must be better than the movie. I read the book and can confirm that the film was a weak adaptation. I might have to read Everything, Everything, because if The Circle was a bad adaptation, this movie was a bad draft of an adaptation.

In Everything,

The pairing of a beloved comedic actress of an earlier generation and one of comedy’s biggest names today in a mother-daughter adventure comedy released Mother’s Day weekend without any of the saccharine frills that usually accompany that holiday seems like it should be a hit. Right? Instead,

Since the election, tech and media companies have asked hard questions about their roles in our democracy. The Circle picks up these same questions, as well as those about privacy, sharing, and the value of all those likes, hearts, and emojis.

The Circle takes place at a fictional tech company of the

In The Void, a police officer, Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) drops an injured man off at a barely functioning hospital, to be cared for by nurse-his wife, Allison (Kathleen Munroe)-and her trainee, Kim (Ellen Wong). Meanwhile, a teenage girl, Maggie (Grace Munro) waits to be seen by Dr. Richard Powell

In the last month, I’ve reviewed a couple of monster movies. King Kong: Skull Island considered the impact of man on the environment. Life featured a scary Martian life form. In The Zookeeper’s Wife, however, all of the monsters are human.

In The Zookeeper’s Wife, Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) and

Scary, ironic, and exciting, Life takes staples of its genre and twists them with little ironies that make an old story feel new. Unlike last year’s Arrival, it champions cooperation but features an alien you would not want to come face-to-face with.

Life opens with the crew of the International