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.
Pokémon: Detective Pikachu has an utterly absurd premise that makes me think we might finally be running out of ideas for original films. That being said, it’s far better than it has any right being, even to a Pokéignorant p...
It would be difficult to make a boring documentary about Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the world’s most famous sex therapist. Even with that in mind, Ask Dr. Ruth takes her fascinating life and brings it context.
Mining nearly every corner of the toy aisle for new movie ideas is nothing new, but it does sometimes give us puzzling choices. The current poster child for this flawed development process is UglyDolls.
I’m not precisely sure who pitched the idea for a juggalo family dramedy, but here we are. Family offers nothing new to push forward character development or storytelling, but it does offer up some relatably imperfect charac...
Some great movies tell a good story or let you escape your reality for a short while, but few make you believe in magic again. Fast Color does all of these things.
Dark comedies often go into the darker corners of humanity, but tend to stay away from showing the implied gore and mayhem on screen. Harpoon is hilarious and not afraid to douse its laughs in buckets of blood.
It’s all too easy for a war film to veer into cliché without focusing on what makes its particular story unique. Girls of the Sun occasionally starts to head toward the generic thumping of “War = Bad,” but its st...
If you like horror films that offer no real scares other than quick shock effects and unconnected imagery, The Curse of La Llorona might just be your new favorite movie.
The horror genre’s subversive nature makes it a natural platform to take on some awfully big questions. I Trapped the Devil takes a long, hard look in humanity’s basement and you might not like what you see looking bac...
Netflix’s Thriller takes the typical teen slasher and puts it in Compton. Unfortunately, moving the location to one rarely shown in genre film is not enough to save the movie from itself.
The new Hellboy has awfully big shoes to fill. Not only does the movie reboot and serve as a prequel to the ambitious films by Guillermo del Toro, it also recast the big red guy himself. Sadly, it’s a slog and a mess.
Stop-motion animation studio Laika might not crank out films in rapid succession, but has been incredibly consistent in the high quality of what it does release. Every Laika film has been nominated for an Oscar, and it would be su...