A.A. Dowd, or Alex to his friends, is a writer and editor based in Chicago. He has held staff positions at The A.V. Club and Time Out Chicago, and is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
Chris Carter's classic TV show The X-Files, which turned 30 this week, hit new peaks of tragicomic brilliance in the six episodes written by Darin Morgan.
From Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to The Flash, superheroes have underperformed in 2023. Will Blue Beetle and other comic book movies suffer the same fate?
Adapting just a few pages of Bram Stoker's novel, The Last Voyage of the Demeter puts an entertaining new spin on the most famous vampire of them all, Dracula.
Jason Statham returns to defend the world from giant, prehistoric sharks in The Meg 2: The Trench, an even-worse thriller that fails to do that premise justice.
Every Terminator sequel since T2 has been a commercial dud. With the advancement of special effects and the rise of AI, why can't the Terminator series succeed?
The 1993 sci-fi film Jurassic Park works as both an entertaining blockbuster and a revealing confession about the damage Steven Spielberg did to modern movies.
Tom Cruise returns once more as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, the latest entry in Hollywood's most reliably entertaining franchise.
Skinamarink, The Outwaters, and Enys Men bring some welcome irrationality back to a horror genre that is too obsessed with blunt metaphors about past trauma.
Released 10 years apart, 28 Days Later and World War Z offered similar prophetic visions of global outbreak that make them more resonant in a post-COVID world.
Built around the only footage of a Polish town destroyed by the Nazis, Three Minutes: A Lengthening is at once a memorial, detective story, and gripping essay.