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.
It would be a much simpler world if a bunch of swearing puppets was enough to carry an entire feature film. Sadly, cussing felt creatures are not enough to keep me entertained, and I discovered that truth by enduring The Happytime...
Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is a Japanese animated film that shows how many adventures you can get into on one night, as long as there’s enough booze.
Being a teenager isn’t easy. Though every kid has a different pile of crud to deal with, they tend to have more in common than not. They all want to find where they belong. They want to figure out how to navigate their world...
Alpha is not a complicated film. It’s a simple story with straightforward characters, but this simplicity allows its characters to grow and the audience to become immersed in their world.
A good documentary needs more than just a good story. It also needs to be a well-assembled film in its own right. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood leans a little too heavily on its subject matter, but it’s a doozy ...
Romantic comedies often get a bum rap, and rightly so. Too often, they’re fleshed out with one-dimensional characters and plots that would simply unravel if the two leads characters had kindergarten-level communication skill...
Basing an entire horror movie around an internet creepypasta sensation, which inspired an actual attempted murder, is not an inherently bad idea for a film. In fact, it could have turned out okay. Sadly, Slender Man somehow turned...
Anything can be a competition. We’ve got cooking shows on Reality TV that pit one chef against another. Singing competitions. Muscle growing showdowns. Magic the Gathering tournaments. Heck, even dog agility can be quantifie...
Dog Days is a really tough film to watch. It’s a godawful slog to get through, but the even greater sin it commits is wasting the talents of an enormous cast of some of the best comedic actors working today.
August has long been associated with the doldrums of cinema. It’s too early for Oscar bait and too late for big blockbuster fun. Unfortunately for us, The Darkest Minds does everything in its power to rise to that level of e...
Few children’s stories are held as dear as those with Winnie the Pooh. Long before being licensed by Disney in 1961, Pooh and his friends had adventures that spanned the whole length of their Hundred Acre Wood. As much as mo...
Like The NeverEnding Story before it, Mission: Impossible continues to dominate the field of inaccurately named movies. Unlike The NeverEnding Story, Mission: Impossible keeps its high quality consistent into the sixth entry of th...