Andrew A. Dowd
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Writer/editor for hire. Formerly: The A.V. Club, Chron, Time Out Chicago. Opinions are bad, and also my own. He/Him/His. letterboxd.com/AADowd/
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Articles by Andrew A. Dowd
Last Breath review: Apollo 13 goes under the sea
Last Breath review: Apollo 13 goes under the sea “It’s fairly gripping from moment to moment, but also hemmed in by its own sense of historical integrity” Pros Grippingly suspenseful at times Admirably focused on the nitty gritty of its true story Cons A little dramatically skimpy at 93 minutes The characterizations are corny “It’s like going into space, but underwater,” saturation diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) says of his uncommon vocation, fixing manmade machinery at depths to which man...
What will win, and what should win, at the Oscars this Sunday
Table of Contents Film critics make for notoriously spotty Oscar soothsayers. We sometimes prognosticate with our hearts instead of our heads. We’re often too close to a year in movies to guess what a bunch of industry professionals might decide are its highlights. That said, almost nobody is all that good at predicting the Oscars, even people whose job it is to predict the Oscars.
What’s the state of the Academy Awards, 10 years after #OscarsSoWhite? Original
It was the hashtag read round the world. “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” quipped lawyer and activist April Reign on January 15, 2015. She was tweeting about that morning’s Academy Award nominations — more specifically, about the fact that every one of the 20 actors recognized across four categories was white. Reign’s criticism would catch on quick, those three words spreading like wildfire across social media.
20 years later, Constantine is more devilish fun than you remember Original
The Lord forgives. So, in time, do film critics, whose snap judgements can be as severe as the punishments of a vengeful god. There was certainly some Old Testament fury to the reviews that crashed like lightning upon Constantine, the 2005 Vertigo comics adaptation that cast Keanu Reeves as an existentially bummed anti-hero, sending unruly half-demons back to Hell with a cigarette dangling from his sneering mouth and a middle finger raised high.
25 years ago, Vin Diesel had the best day of his career
More than almost any other movie star working today, Vin Diesel seems to think only in franchises. Skim the last two decades of this muscle man’s filmography, and you’ll see almost nothing but sequels or movies designed (not always successfully) to spawn sequels. Once Vin got a taste of life in the fast lane, he never really looked back.
40 years later, there’s no forgetting about The Breakfast Club Original
The late John Hughes once mulled a sequel to his 1985 ode to adolescence, The Breakfast Club. The idea was that he’d pick up years later with the same characters, five suburban teenagers from different cliques who look past their differences and forge some common ground over a long Saturday in detention. Simple minds race with the questions Hughes could answer by reconvening his party of five.
Captain America: Brave New World review: a new rock bottom for Marvel
Captain America: Brave New World review: a new rock bottom for Marvel “No blockbuster that cost this much money should look this shoddy.” Pros Red Hulk is reasonably fun Cons The action is a mess The plot is a mess It looks like bad TV There’s a sequence in Captain America: Brave New Worldso haphazardly shot, conceived, and assembled that you can barely believe it made it into a major motion picture bound for thousands of theaters.
Back in theaters, Parasite is the perfect thriller for our post-Luigi world
Five years after it took the Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Awards, and the global box office by storm, Parasite is back on the big screen. That’s a pretty short amount of time to commemorate with an anniversary rerelease. Then again, it’s been a long five years, hasn’t it?
The Marvel movies lost something when they lost Steve Rogers Original
“You’re not Steve Rogers,” growls Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross with signature Harrison Ford crankiness in Captain America: Brave New World, the new Marvel movie coming to theaters next week. It’s a point the man he’s addressing, the man in the stars and stripes, confidently concedes. Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) spent some of his Disney+ vehicle The Falcon and the Winter Soldier doubting his fitness to carry the shield Rogers, the original Captain America, passed down to him.
The Dark Universe is dead, but the Universal Monsters aren’t Original
The big, bad count of this winter’s Nosferatu goes by Orlok, but you know his real name. (The estate of Bram Stoker sure did back in the 1920s, when they sued F.W. Murnau for copyright infringement.) And though the title character of Wolf Man isn’t Lawrence Talbot, he hails from the same lycanthropic lineage that had Lon Chaney Jr. howling at the full moon.
Why did the Oscars snub one of last year’s best movies? Original
When it comes to the Oscars, there’s always something to bellyache about. Forget the unworthy films the Academy deems worthy. (Paging Ms. Pérez, first name Emilia.) It’s what doesn’t get nominated that really ticks people off. Last January, even Hillary Clinton weighed in on the “snubbing” of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, star and writer-director, respectively, of Barbie. This year, grievances have been aired on behalf of Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Dune director Denis Villeneuve.
Flight Risk review: Mark Wahlberg thriller crashes and burns
Flight Risk review: Mark Wahlberg thriller crashes and burns “A rinky-dink B-movie howler, bad without ascending to the delirious heights of bad taste you might expect from the pairing of Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg” Pros Solid thriller premise Some unintentional laughs Cons Wahlberg is ridiculous and miscast The action is choppy and ineptly staged The dialogue is all groaners In Flight Risk, Mark Wahlberg jettisons his usual air of dimly perturbed gym-rat nobility to play a blathering...
All the 2025 Best Picture Oscar nominees, ranked
Table of Contents Los Angeles smolders, but the show must go on, apparently. Delaying no further, the Academy yesterday announced the nominees for the 2025 Oscars — one year to the day from the last time they unveiled the contenders in every category. No Barbenheimer looming over our new Oscar season, try though entertainment journalists and social media users did to manufacture a sequel to that double-feature moviegoing event for the ages.
20 years ago, they brought a John Carpenter classic into the 2000s Original
The first thing you miss is the music. That funky, synthesizer throb. That heartbeat of stone-cold menace. Everyone loves the iconic tinkle of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme, but two years earlier, he composed a score every bit as infectiously stark, instantly setting the tone of his low-budget 1976 thriller Assault on Precinct 13. When Hollywood got around to remaking Assault in 2005, they went a different way musically.
Wolf Man review: Woof!
“Wolf Man quickly settles into a dour, curiously unimaginative funk.” Pros A few stylish flourishes The prologue is promisingly ominous Cons The imagery is underlit The performances are flat It's neither scary nor exciting Stanley Kubrick famously shot the indoor scenes of his lavish costume drama Barry Lyndon by candlelight. Not to be outdone, Aussie filmmaker Leigh Whannell has now made a monster movie that often appears to have been shot by nothing but the glow of the moon.
There’s no 'fixing' the worst aspect of Alien: Romulus Original
Gallons of ink, thick as monster blood, have already been spilled on Alien: Romulus. To some, Fede Álvarez’s legacy sequel looked like the best Alien in ages — a winningly wet creature feature that took the franchise back to squishy basics. Others saw only a derivative Greatest Hits, content to echo past entries instead of putting its own mark on the series. Opinion, in other words, remains sharply divided on last summer’s return voyage to a space where no one can hear you scream.
Ridley Scott makes blockbusters for grownups. Here's why that matters now more than ever
Jon Hamm is no stranger to successful TV shows, and it seems like he might have another one on his hands. Deadline is reporting that Hamm's new show Your Friends and Neighbors, which is set to premiere on Apple TV+ in April, has already been renewed for a second season by the streamer. The series will debut the first two episodes of its first season on April 11 and will air the rest of its nine episodes weekly through May 30.
Gladiator II review: Paul Mescal is no Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott's disappointing sequel
“To reach the cornball heights of Gladiator, it would need what Russell Crowe brought to the table.” Pros Denzel Washington is a hoot Some of the spectacle is dumb fun Cons Mescal lacks Russell Crowe's star power The plot is a muddled bore Rhinos and sharks and baboons, oh my! Through the mighty Colosseum gates of Gladiator II races a menagerie of digital attractions, charging and gnashing unnaturally like escapees from Jumanji. Are you not entertained?
A legendary musician wrote a bonkers Gladiator II movie that was never made Original
It took more than 20 years, but they finally got around to making a sequel to Gladiator, the rock-the-Colosseum phenomenon that conquered the box office and won the Best Picture Oscar at the start of this century. Ridley Scott’s belated return to an Ancient Rome of swords, sandals, and teeming CGI crowds finally arrives in American theaters this weekend, ready to satiate the bloodlust of a multiplex hoi polloi ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Robert Zemeckis is still lost in the uncanny valley. Can he be saved? Original
It was only a matter of time before Robert Zemeckis got around to playing with de-aging technology, that modern cinematic magic trick of making veteran movie stars look kind of, sort of like their younger selves. The director of Forrest Gump and the Back to the Future trilogy has spent most of his career dabbling in the possibilities of digital effects — and, in several cases, advancing them.
Juror #2 review: Clint Eastwood’s best movie in years. It's a shame you probably can't see it
“Eastwood has made the kind of adult-oriented, actor-driven entertainment that’s difficult to take for granted in our all-ages blockbuster age.” Pros Eastwood's sturdy, elegant direction Terrific performances An ingenious spin on 12 Angry Men Cons The premise is a little preposterous It's only coming to a handful of theaters At 94 years old, Clint Eastwood has reached the age where every new movie he makes could be his last.
Venom, Joker, and the year of supervillain cinema Original
Mark Millar’s limited series Wanted, loosely adapted in 2008 into an atrocious movie, imagined a dystopian world where all the superheroes are dead and the supervillains have won. That’s kind of how the multiplex feels right now. Comic-book cinema, which towered over the competition a mere five years ago (it reached its popular peak in 2019, the year of Avengers: Endgame and Joker), has entered a state of ongoing commercial decline.
Smile 2 and Trap are horror movies for a pop-obsessed world Original
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Trap and Smile 2. Six decades after Beatlemania, pop stars still rule the world. Their grip over the public imagination has never really slackened, even as the definition of pop has morphed and mutated like TLC forming from T-1000 liquid goop in their most iconic music video. Still, if pop stardom is a constant, it’s loomed especially large over the culture of late.
Saturday Night review: A Saturday Night Live origin story that plays it too safe
“It's like the comedy-nerd version of a Marvel movie packed with surprise cameos and applause lines.” Pros The impressions are gold The celluloid imagery sparkles SNL fans will be in reference heaven Cons Reitman cheats the real-time premise It's awfully reverent of Lorne Michaels It's pretty tidy in its chaos, too Gabriel LaBelle is one of the only actors in the giant ensemble cast of Saturday Night who isn’t doing a showy impersonation of the real person he’s playing.
At 50, this classic horror movie is still cinema’s ultimate nightmare Original
Earlier this week, Variety published a list of the 100 best horror movies ever. Sitting at the top, like an exhumed corpse festering in the brilliant midday sun, was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This was not a controversial choice on the publication’s part, not in the year of our unholy lord of darkness 2024.
Joker: Folie à Deux review: an oddly timid musical sequel
“The Joker sequel is unlikely to satisfy old fans or convert new ones.” Pros It looks and sounds great Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn is inspired casting It's theoretically bold to make a Joker musical Cons The film doesn't really commit to its genre pivot It's dramatically unsatisfying Gaga is mostly wasted How strange to remember the mass anxiety, the sheer handwringing unease, that greeted the theatrical release of Joker just five years ago.
At 10, this modern classic remains a brilliant prank of a thriller Original
The first ingenious choice David Fincher made in his adaptation of Gone Girl was to cast Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, the stalled writer and deadbeat husband who discovers his wife, Amy, has disappeared on their wedding anniversary. Or does he know more than he’s letting on? Affleck, then in his early ’40s, still had the square-jawed good looks that landed him an ill-fated turn in the cape and cowl that same year.
Megalopolis review: Francis Ford Coppola’s flawed, insane sci-fi opus
“Megalopolis can be safely characterized as both a radical passion project and a bewildering disaster” Pros It's a totally uncompromised vision Some of the imagery is dazzling There's some amazing insanity Cons It's philosophically vague The cinematography can be ugly The plot is a laborious muddle Megalopolis lived in Francis Ford Coppola’s imagination for nearly 40 years, and he spent about half of that time, on and off, trying to get it made, to convert his bold blueprint into reality.
30 years ago, Tim Burton offered his most adult, bittersweet fairy tale
The Ghost with the Most is back — and so is his creator, his handler, his bedfellow in crooked imagination, Tim Burton. Topping the box office for a third consecutive weekend, Beetlejuice Beetlejuicehas quickly become the director’s biggest hit in nearly 15 years. Whether it also qualifies as a return to form for Hollywood’s most gothically inclined fabulist is another matter.
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ review by A.A. Dowd • Letterboxd
★½ Fitting that one of the only moments that lands in this ghastly, brutally unfunny mess is Bellucci putting herself back together after an eternity in storage. Whole misbegotten thing feels like various moldering drafts of a Beetlejuice sequel dug out of a desk drawer and inelegantly stapled together—a little legacy sequel here, a woefully underdeveloped and expendable Bride of Beetlejuice subplot there, Wednesday shit for the kids.
Why wasn't this Brad Pitt space odyssey a bigger hit 5 years ago? Original
You think you know your home planet. Then Brad Pitt makes a ravishing Hollywood space odyssey with car chases on the moon, perilous zero-gravity encounters, and rampaging baboons, and no one shows up for it! OK, that’s an exaggeration: Some people did show up to James Gray’s galaxy-spanning melodrama Ad Astra, which more or less broke even when it hit theaters five years ago today. But the public reaction was awfully quiet (like, vacuum of space quiet) for a movie of this genre with this star.
The Substance review: the grossest movie of 2024 is also one of its best
“Every ticket sold for The Substance should come with a commemorative barf bag.” Pros It's gloriously gross The effects are astonishing Demi Moore delivers a fearless performance Cons You might barf The opening couple minutes of The Substance are elegantly efficient — words that don’t much leap to mind during the remaining 138 minutes of this outrageous movie.
10 years ago, this action thriller unleashed an evil Captain America on an unsuspecting audience Original
Were someone to organize a school dance around the year in horror, it’s pretty clear who would be standing on stage like Carrie White at the end of the evening. Class of 2024, please give a warm round of applause to your newly crowned king and queen of Halloween: Dan Stevens and Maika Monroe.
This 2024 movie is a lo-fi Jason Bourne paranoid thriller you need to watch (if you can)
This 2024 movie is a lo-fi Jason Bourne paranoid thriller you need to watch (if you can) “It’s a reasonably smart thriller that dumbs itself down as it goes.” Pros The premise is novel Riz Ahmed makes a good action hero Cons The script gets dopier as it goes The big twist is a real groaner There’s no shortage of movies about the courage of whistleblowers, and nor should there be: Proverbial insiders risking their professional future (and sometimes much more) to reveal the dark deeds of their...
This movie might just be 2024's most unnerving action thriller
This movie might just be 2024’s most unnerving action thriller “Cloud ends up playing like an outrageous riff on Assault on Precinct 13, blurring the line between action spectacle and home-invasion horror.” Pros Expertly staged action Some fine, dry humor A little of that Pulse dread Cons The premise is a little goofy It takes a while to ramp up In a perfect world, the success of Longlegs this summer would draw fresh eyes to one of its plainest influences.
At 30, TV’s greatest teen drama remains as wonderful as you remember Original
Just about every episode of My So-Called Life opened with the same ecstatic image: Claire Danes, the show’s then-teenage star, racing into frame, her beaming face haloed by a red streak of newly dyed hair. This was the opening shot of the opening credits, an elegantly assembled montage of moments plucked from the series and set to the tuneful alt-rock noodling of W. G. Snuffy Walden’s original theme.
10 years ago, a famous TV marathon event made us all Simpsons fans again Original
The Simpsons has been on the air for so long now that it practically is the air. After 35 seasons and counting, there’s a little of Matt Groening’s apparently immortal animated sitcom in every breath of pop culture we take. But if TV’s longest-running scripted comedy has felt like a constant for ages, it really became one in the summer of 2014. Suddenly, a show you could expect to always be on in a general sense was literally always on — 24 hours a day for just shy of two weeks.
Is Alien the ultimate directors’ franchise? Original
Alien: Romulus, new to theaters this weekend, is the first entry in the 45-year-old sci-fi franchise that aims more for a dopamine hit than an adrenaline rush. It’s basically a greatest hits of the Alien franchise, remixing elements and images from what came before it. The production design closely mirrors that of Ridley Scott’s original, down to the use of onscreen technology that only looked futuristic in 1979.
Alien: Romulus review: a down-and-dirty creature feature that plays it too safe
“What Álvarez has really assembled is a sampler platter of Alien leftovers.” Pros Great set design Great effects Some gnarly, inventive sequences Cons Boring characters Endless winks at the other movies One very misjudged cameo Most of Alien: Romulus, the umpteenth installment in a series forever docked at the intersection of horror and sci-fi, takes place aboard a derelict space station. You know the kind: cavernous, leaky, closer in ambiance to an abandoned factory than a Starfleet hub.
The scariest Alien sequel isn’t a movie at all Original
Alien remains a one-of-a-kind nightmare. There’s just no replicating the dread of Ridley Scott’s 1979 deep-space thriller. James Cameron knew that, and smartly did his own thing with Aliens, fashioning a sequel that traded the original’s ruthless minimalism for bug-hunt spectacle. Scott knew it, too, judging from the direction in which he took the franchise with a pair of prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which were heavier on philosophy and mythology than terror.
With Deadpool & Wolverine and Downey Jr.'s return as Doctor Doom, Marvel is getting desperate Original
The news came, as such news so often does, at that annual summit of studio hype and intellectual property promotion, San Diego Comic-Con. Robert Downey Jr. — newly minted Oscar-winner, a star emancipated from green-screen duty — will be returning to the franchise that revived his career, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not, mind you, to the role of Tony Stark, the mogul-turned-superhero he played for about a decade, starting with the first MCU installment, Iron Man.
20 years ago, one of the most unsettling movies ever made divided audiences Original
There were two movie posters widely used for Open Water, the low-budget survival thriller that swam into theaters 20 years ago today. The more sensational of the two featured the film’s stars, Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis, bobbing in the water near the background of the frame. In the foreground — overshadowing them, nearly blotting out the whole image — is a large dorsal fin. This is what you could call the standard protocol for selling a movie about aquatic maneaters.
Forget Deadpool & Wolverine -- this is the best X-Men adaptation of them all Original
The X-Men movie universe has officially expired. Cause of death: corporate merger. Fans have probably pre-mourned the first superhero franchise of the modern era, which has been on life support for years, as Disney cleared its slate of leftovers — like Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants — in preparation for an inevitable Marvel Cinematic Universe reboot.
Trap review: Shyamalan's new thriller is deeply stupid
Trap review: M. Night Shyamalan’s new thriller is deeply stupid “There’s scarcely a single plausible moment in the entire film.” Pros Josh Harnett is creepy good The premise is fun There's an affecting personal element Cons The plot is deeply implausible The dialogue is awkward even for Shyamalan You don’t go to an M. Night Shyamalan movie expecting airtight logic. Who really cares why aliens with an allergy to H2O would invade a planet covered in water?
20 years later, this widely hated blockbuster is still one of Hollywood's most underrated thrillers Original
There’s a new M. Night Shyamalan movie opening this coming weekend, but you’ll have to wait a couple more days to hear how it is. Trap, starring Josh Hartnett as … well, let’s say less than the trailer does, is not screening at all for the press in advance of its release on Friday. Shyamalan still divides critics. The reviews for his 2021 film Old, for example, were rather evenly, ahem, split between positive and negative. So it’s possible the studio is trying to delay the inevitable pans.
Deadpool & Wolverine review: an inside joke that grows old
“Deadpool & Wolverine wants to have its chimichanga and eat it, too.” Pros You'll laugh Jackman is back in his gruff groove The cameos are fun Cons The Marvel in-jokes wear thin “That's a lot of exposition for a threequel” The cameos get exhausting Even for a movie starring an antihero with an enthusiasm for pegging, Deadpool & Wolverine is very far up its own ass. It doesn’t need a script doctor so much as a proctologist.
Twisters? Longlegs? Deadpool? The '90s are back, baby! Original
Boeing malfunctions, Olympic games, two white guys competing for the White House — have we all plummeted backward in time to 1996? The déjà vu is deafening at the multiplex, too. There, Americans have made like their ancestors and flocked in great numbers to a new blockbuster about flirtatiously mismatched storm chasers racing across a wind-ravaged heartland.
30 years ago, this action movie changed Hollywood forever. But was it for better or worse? Original
No one blinks anymore when a movie costs $100 million. That’s what most Hollywood movies cost today, isn’t it? It’s what Apple spent, for example, on this past weekend’s Fly Me to the Moon, the kind of frothy, human-scaled, adult-oriented comedy that’s often cited as counterprogramming to the expensive blockbusters the studios otherwise bankroll. Meanwhile, last year’s The Creator was celebrated for achieving its eye-popping special-effects spectacle for the low, low price of… $80 million.
Longlegs review: Nic Cage movie doesn't live up to the hype
“Longlegs starring Nicolas Cage is all creepy effect all the time.” Pros It looks hauntingly beautiful The style is arresting Maika Monroe is a superb scream queen Cons The story is derivative boilerplate The creepy power fades Nicolas Cage overdoes the madman shtick The early reactions to Longlegs have been almost hysterical in their steel-your-nerves, hide-your-children hyperbole.
This unforgettable film might just be the best sci-fi movie ever made. Here's why
FOE | Official Trailer The sci-fi genre is more alive and popular than ever. Just last weekend, Gareth Edwards' original blockbuster The Creator debuted in multiplexes nationwide, while more arty movies like The Beast and Poor Things premiered at the 2023 New York Film Festival to almost universal acclaim. Now more than ever, sci-fi speaks to our particular moment in time, when the rise of AI technology magnifies humankind's universal concerns about identity, aging, and mortality.
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