the @popcollin reviews

Taken almost word-for-word from the transcript of the FBI’s 2017 interrogation of NSA leaker Reality Winner, this fascinating film from playwright Tina Satter is an intense character study that sucks you in from the get-go. Starring as Reality, Sydney Sweeney absolutely knocks it out of the park, doing far and […]

Winner of six Cesar Awards, including Best Film and Best Director (Dominik Moll), this dark, bleak crime drama about the unsolved murder of a young French woman may just be the best of its kind in a good long while. Reminiscent of American fare like ‘Mystic River’ and ‘Gone Baby […]

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 […]

Jake Gyllenhall stars as Master Sergeant John Kinley in this gritty and riveting war drama set in 2018 during the War in Afghanistan. Equal parts ‘Lone Survivor’ and ‘The Outpost’, it’s a harrowing story inspired by the local interpreters who aided US troops in the region. When Kinley’s unit is […]

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 […]