About Deirdre Crimmins
Deirdre Crimmins is Chicago-based freelance film critic and a member of the Boston Online Film Critics Association. She contributes regularly to FilmThrills, Rue Morgue magazine, and Birth.Movies.Death. Though a lifelong horror film fan, she also loves a good musical or screwball comedy when the mood strikes.
You can, and probably should, accuse director Lars von Trier of being many things, but boring is never one of them. He’s inflammatory and intentionally offensive, and his films follow suit. Through the various genre filters ...
Vox Lux is a fictional tale of a young pop star’s meteoric rise into a successful recording and touring career. Beyond that very loose premise, the movie has no other major factors in common with A Star Is Born, or even Neil...
Though director/actor/writer Adam Christian Clark’s Newly Single is supposedly semi-autobiographical, I hope that his character is more fiction than not. In the film, which is currently on iTunes, the main character comes ac...
Between escape room group adventure games and extreme haunted houses, horror fans are taking their love for scares off the page and screen and into the real world. Ruin Me, a Shudder exclusive, shows how terribly wrong things can ...
As more of our time shifts from the outside world to the online world, it makes perfect sense for movies to pay closer attention to that realm. Prime Video’s A Million Hits looks at the place where cyberbullying and school y...
Kurt Russell has made a career out of being a man’s man. After outgrowing his child acting days, Russell has had a long run of ass-kicking, heroic (though occasionally clumsy) roles that have kept him in the public’s g...
Dumb movies can be fun, but that doesn’t make them good. Take the new, revisionist Robin Hood. It sure is fun at times, but this excitement and levity cannot save the movie from itself.
If we’ve learned anything from boxing movies, it’s that the brutality of the sport is not in direct contrast to the emotions behind those punches. Divorcing passion in the ring from passion outside the ring is both imp...
Neither families nor films behave like instant soup. One cannot simply combine the ingredients, stir, and expect a delicious outcome. Instant Family provides the evidence for this on both fronts.
Ravenous Harry Potter fans will likely feast in the often visually stunning Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, as it’s made just for them. The rest of us casual fans or disinterested parties will either be bored or...
It’s a pity that The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story takes a fascinating character like Lisbeth Salander and turns her into a generic hacker action star. The character’s trauma and her surviva...
Though the title doesn’t go into plot details, The Grinch is specifically about that green grump trying, once again, to steal Christmas. In the second feature-length adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ classic children’s bo...