Nick Kush

Rod Goldman and Al Silverman are street performers who work the tourist scene of Times Square. Goldman gets no respect and Silverman is the first one to make sure of that.   Credits Directed By:…

Ah, January, a time when every critic wonders why they even bother. I often think that studios think something similar as they release bottom-of-the-barrel material with a lazy shrug that says, “well, at least we…

The last bit of text before the credits come over the screen in Just Mercy reads “For every 9 people who have been executed in the U.S., one person on death row has been proven…

With a few days to reflect on all the movies I watched in the last calendar year, I feel very content with 2019’s slate. But I still watched a ton of crap. Too much, in…

Was 2019 a good or bad year for movies? Who’s to say. Regardless of what the immediate outcome is at the Oscars in a few months, we won’t know for sure until years down the…

By the power of Netflix, Marriage Story, a fairly serious drama about an insanely contentious divorce, has been memed to death by Film Twitter and beyond. Stills of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson arguing about…

There’s no denying that Star Wars has become one of the most popular franchises in film history, if not the most popular. George Lucas changed the cinematic landscape back in 1977, and we’ve felt it ever since. …

Uncut Gems feels like it is partially plucked from my dream journal. It has so many things that I love or am captivated by, from a New York-based crime story to a great Adam Sandler…

We should bar every critic from calling 1917 a “cinematic achievement”, a “technical achievement”, or any derivation of the two. It’s an overused phrase in film discourse as it is, but 1917 has only made…

Anyone that is familiar with Noah Baumbach’s work would know that Marriage Story isn’t necessarily breaking new ground. He’s made his career on telling family dramas about individuals in metropolitan areas, specifically New York. Most…

Over the years, coming-of-age films have taught me one overarching idea: rebellious teens gotta rebel. It’s a timeless idea baked into coming-of-age tales from every generation in which a young adult begins to form their…

Since Netflix began pumping out original content every single week, there’s been a clear difference between their high-end properties such as Roma or the upcoming The Irishman and something such as Tall Girl or Sierra Burgess is a Loser. Putting…

Every so often, I watch a movie and am immediately filled with dread afterward because I have no idea how to discuss it. Any critic will tell you that the hardest reviews are those you…

I don’t envy the nearly impossible task that director Mike Flanagan had in developing Doctor Sleep. Not only would he have to successfully adapt what is, by all accounts, a fairly sprawling work by Stephen…

So far in his career, Taika Waititi has essentially told two kinds of stories: ones that are nothing but unabashedly goofy chaos (think What We Do in the Shadows or Thor: Ragnarok) or a coming-of-age…

I’m one of the few people that ride for Terminator: Rise of the Machines. Maybe less so for the actual content of the film — I find it a solid if semi-disposable sequel with an awesomely…

Joker remains a box office sensation by reclaiming the top spot at the box office, wrestling it away from Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, which continues to be a movie that exists. The Todd Phillips’ movie…

At this point, it’s a cliché to say how we take our most basic functions for granted. Hearing a loved one, having clarity of the mind, for instance. There’s also a reason why those kinds…

A movie entitled “Joker” has arrived in theaters. Odds are that you may have heard about it. Maybe. Joker is all over the place from fire memes to fire think pieces. Everyone has an opinion,…

With Joker being such a blatant homage to the works of Martin Scorsese and other filmmakers that told scuzzy New York dramas in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s interesting timing that Scorsese himself, while on…

Though he certainly never left, 2019 is a bit of a mini-comeback for Brad Pitt, with high-profile roles in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and now Ad Astra. He’s on-screen for almost all of…

I’ve had my eye on Ad Astra for some time now. Brad Pitt has a way of teaming up with very thoughtful and fairly singular filmmakers that always gets me excited. That’s not to say…

Focus Features made history with the release of Downton Abbey this weekend which went on to earn approximately $31 million, which became the studio’s largest opening in history — and impressive feat for a well-entrenched…

2017’s It remains one of the most surprising smash hits of the decade. People went nuts over it, and it started another round of Stephen King adaptations in Hollywood. Two years later, we’re back in…

Sometimes, the Academy of Arts and Sciences leaves you saying, “wait, you chose that as the Best Picture winner?”  People have said this phrase quite a bit over the years, and there’s no doubting that the Academy…

Many of the most high-profile movies of August — Hobbs and Shaw, Good Boys, The Angry Birds 2, and even Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark — were mired in mediocrity, doing a few…

After Hobbs and Shaw — the cinematic equivalent of an eight-year-old boy smashing toxically buff action figures together for two hours — opened in theaters, the rest of August was full of intriguing projects, many…

It’s never a good sign when a movie shifts release dates multiple times. That was the case for Where’d You Go, Bernadette, the latest film from acclaimed director Richard Linklater. After an initial release scheduled for…

Spend five seconds scrolling through Twitter and you’re immediately inundated with existential dread from the impending doom of our entire species. The Amazon is up in flames, many countries are on the verge of political…

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we all abide by certain societal expectations. Some are harmless, some are exactly the opposite. Luce understands this idea and wishes to discuss it head-on, weaving demanding racial themes…

As a critic, there is the rare occasion where you see a film and think “my god, this movie is going to be HUGE!” I speak in relative terms, of course, as Brittany Runs a…

Nature is continuously beguiling. From changing flora to shifting land formations, there’s always something beautiful to behold. Take water, for instance, which is always changing form and the landscape around it. In Aquarela, Viktor Kossakovsky’s…

Sometimes not getting into the screening you desire at a film festival can be a blessing in disguise. After missing out on seeing The Farewell at Sundance earlier this year, I rushed to find another…

You’ve heard it time and time again: “Blade Runner was a flop in theaters”, “no one liked The Thing when it first came out”, “The Shawshank Redemption was a belated classic,” etc. The hard, well-known…

Praise the heavens! July was actually a solid month for film. With Quentin Tarantino debuting a new work and plenty of smaller releases which resulted in a wave of support from Film Twitter, one really…

These best/worst of the month articles are always an opportunity to express my exaggerated concerns with the industry as a whole. However, July was actually a bright spot of the summer movie season, balancing nicely…

Hollywood has made a habit of repurposing buzzy foreign films into English-language stories. (Look no further than The Upside from just a few months ago.) Some Most of these attempts are worthless, acting as soulless retreads in…

Quentin Tarantino continues his love for film and history (and film history) with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a sprawling story covering an actor and his stuntman and their declining careers in the industry.…

In 1994, Quentin Tarantino was on top of the world. He had just followed up his critical darling film Reservoir Dogs with Pulp Fiction, essentially crowning him as the next celebrity director. In the eyes of many, he…

The Fast and Furious franchise may not be everyone’s favorite, but there’s no debating that it still has a massive built-in fan base and has continued to gross stupid amounts of money at the box…