the @popcollin reviews

As heartbreaking as it is inspirational, this powerful film about the ‘Back to the Future’ star’s battle with Parkinson’s is as fine a documentary as you’ll see this year. Director Davis Guggenheim (‘He Named Me Malala’) lets Fox tell his story, warts and all, and spares us the traditional documentary […]

Actress Frances O’Connor makes her screenwriting and directing debut with this loose adaptation of Emily Brontë’s later years, focusing on her (imagined) affair with a local parson. It’s a wild, romantic, and dark (almost gothic) bit of brilliant filmmaking, highlighted by the stunning performance by Emma Mackey (‘Death on the […]

If you love it, miss it, or never saw it but are curious what all the hype is about, now’s your chance. Presented with remastered audio and video and in 3D (which only serves to add depth and not function as a gimmick), the 1997 epic is back in theaters […]

Sparse on dialogue and even more sparse on veritable plot points, ‘An Cailín Ciúin’ (in its original Irish) is a bonafide multiple-tissue weepie about the heartbreaking things some children have to endure. A beautiful and subtly powerful film by writer-director Colm Bairéad, it stars young Catherine Clinch (in her debut) […]

It seems rather poetic (or maybe just coincidental) that one of the worst movies of the year and one of the best are both riffs on the age-old tale of the wooden boy with the nose that grows. While the Robert Zemeckis-directed dud with Tom Hanks was a ridiculous disappointment, […]

Based in the same world as ‘Knives Out’ but with Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc as the only connecting thread, this fantastic whodunnit stars Ed Norton, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, and more. Just as good as (if not better than) the original, writer-director Rian Johnson’s mystery not […]

Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be another way to give ‘A Christmas Carol’ a new spin, along comes this hilarious and clever musical effort from ‘We’re the Millers’ scribe Sean Anders, who directed and co-wrote. Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell have infectious and palpable buckets of fun singing […]

Based on the century-old comic strip ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’, this fantastical (and fantastic), wildly inventive ride from director Francis Lawrence (‘Water for Elephants’, ‘The Hunger Games’) is a visual treat, chock-full of marvelous visual effects, but it’s also a thrilling and heartfelt story about a young, orphaned girl who […]

Director (and co-writer) Ryan Coogler’s follow-up to the 2018 Marvel masterpiece may not be quite as spectacular as the original—the gaping hole left by Chadwick Boseman’s passing is palpable—but it still emerges as one of the better Marvel entries of the past decade. Letitia Wright (Shuri), Lupita Nyong’o (Nakia), and […]

Hot on the heels of ‘The Good Nurse’—the solid Netflix dramatization of the Charles Cullen murders—this documentary introduces us to the real people involved in the horrifying story. Director Tim Travers Hawkins pulls together all the key figures, including whistleblower nurse Amy Loughren, the investigators, and even recordings of Cullen […]