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.
Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature isn’t exactly the most relatable experience. Then again, the purpose of The Wife is not to be relatable, or even to alienate. Rather, the film aims to be a tight examination of a truly ...
A Simple Favor may seem, at first glance, to be director Paul Feig’s first foray into more serious filmmaking. Feig has carved a niche as a director of female-centric comedies such as Bridesmaids, Spy, and The Heat. While A ...
Though some report that throwing pasta at the wall is the best way to test if it’s al dente, throwing horror elements at the wall, to see what sticks, is no way to make a movie. If you do that, you end up with Mara, and nobo...
The cinematic universe started with The Conjuring has been going strong since its inception in 2013. With two films in the main corral, two Annabelle prequels, and now an origin story of that creepy nun we spied in The Conjuring 2...
A sleepy, seaside British village might not be the most universally relatable location for a film, but even within the picturesque setting there’s room for personal disappointment. In Juliet, Naked we see that relationships ...
It has come to be a cliché to say that a building, such as a house, is a character within a film. However, in a haunted Gothic horror like The Little Stranger, the possibility of the house acting of its own accord is a big part of...
Ted Geoghegan’s second feature film is quite a departure from 2015’s We Are Still Here. While his first movie was a gushing love letter to horror’s history of haunted houses and small town secrets, Mohawk treads ...
Often, when a film asks you to suspend your disbelief, it’s asking that you believe in a fairy tale, or that love conquers all, or even that John Travolta’s hairline is natural. This is why it’s so odd that the b...
Adapting a true story into a feature film requires striking a delicate balance. The movie should remain faithful to the actual events, but also needs to be entertaining. Operation Finale tells a mostly true story, but forgets to m...
In arguably one of the best episodes of the greatly undervalued show Party Down, Steve Guttenberg asks a question that is especially topical to a film like Kin: “Are science fiction and heart mutually exclusive?”
Fast-talking British crime comedies go way back in cinema’s history. I was raised by a man who thinks 1955’s The Ladykillers is the precise peak of our culture, so this genre has always been near and dear to my heart. ...
Occasionally, a film comes along that fails to fit into any neat boxes. It’s dreamy, but firmly has both feet on the ground. Its main character is a child, yet lacks any notion of twee naivety. It’s got a lot going on,...