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.
The Upside is a pandering mashup of nearly every scrap of emotional shorthand in a cinematic dustbin. Though the effect is not wholly unpleasant, it’s dull, disingenuous, and just as funny as a polite joke from a cashier to ...
Fighting off a bunch of backwoods yokels is nothing new to horror movies, but somehow Rust Creek makes this old tale feel fresh and tense.
Don’t get me wrong, Escape Room is a dumb film. Its shaky foundation is barely supported by any rational semblance of plot, character, or even logic. But all of those cataclysmic shortcomings never stop it from being an unap...
Based on the novel by Josh Malerman, Bird Box is the latest addition to both Netflix’s original film lineup and the horror subgenre featuring sensory deprivation. The post-apocalyptic thriller is allegedly the most-watched N...
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been getting a lot of well-earned attention lately. The Supreme Court justice, and supremely kickass feminist, was the subject of the excellent documentary RBG a few months ago. Now comes the fictionalized,...
Pitching Second Act as a romantic comedy is dead wrong, as it is neither. The romance is barely a phantom presence within a plot that wildly spasms from one neatly contrived thread to the next, and the only comedy comes from a plu...
Welcome to Marwen doesn’t sit right with me. Though a technical marvel, the tonally irresponsible film tries to turn a real-life tragedy into an uplifting tale, and manages to miss all of the right emotions in the process.
When it comes down to it, Dumplin’ doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before. It’s a tale of self-acceptance and growing up through the framework of competition and community. However, it still manages to ...
Ben Is Back is the latest film to tackle the losing battle this country is waging with the opioid crisis. However, rather than showing the effects of addiction and the long road to recovery, it instead focuses on the criminal elem...
If Deadpool is known for two things, they’re his metatextuality and the fact that he’s definitely not for young kids or those with delicate sensibilities. With this week’s release of Once Upon a Deadpool, the nau...
Adapting a full novel into a single film is a fool’s errand. While it can (and has) been done well, all too often the full breadth of the story is better suited for the page than for the screen. Mortal Engines is a prime exa...
Netflix’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle might pull from the same Rudyard Kipling story as Disney’s The Jungle Book, but this dark tale of survival has no singing bears for the kiddos’ amusement. It’s an exer...