Loud, ludicrous and full of blood and anguish with only a modicum of insight or intelligence, the Scream franchise has long since become what it used to satirize. A copy of a copy of a copy, Scream VI is a degraded photostat lacking all definition, showing only the rough contour of its antecedent but nothing in the interior. Whatever bite …
Magic Mike’s Last Dance may be the worst film Steven Soderbergh has ever made. Which isn’t to say it is bad, Soderbergh may be incapable of making an out and out bad film even with some of his low budget experiments of the 2000s. But it is thoroughly mediocre in a way Soderbergh has never …
Alternately exhilarating and hysterical, The Legend of Vox Machina expands its ambitions in its second season, delving deeply into its sprawling cast’s backstory and dramatically upping the stakes at the cost of pace and having emotional beat land. The animated adaptation of the popular Dungeons & Dragons live play Critical Role spent its first season …
Like its unliving namesake, M3GAN is a vault of truly terrifying ideas — about who is raising our children in the modern age and what our apathy of their experience could turn them into — wrapped up in so much plastic and synthesized entertainment the horror within remains hidden and impossible to see. While M3GAN …
Roughly halfway through the 192-minute running time of Avatar: The Way of Water we watch young Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the semi-messianic miracle child of Weaver’s previous character Dr. Grace Augustine, staring at a crab hole under the water, lost in the miracle of nature to the point all conception of time and space has faded away. Why …
Simultaneously explorative and deeply reductive, Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Blonde delves as deeply into Marilyn Monroe’s (Ana de Armas) battle between her public and private personae as anyone ever has, but the film only manages to find tired Freudian pop answers beneath the sediment. Joyce Carol Oates’ semi-biographical novel (Order Now) provides a moderate starting point, turning …
The first thing to be said about Zach Cregger’s Barbarian is that you can’t really talk about it; to say too much about is not just to spoil its inherent surprises but to reduce its actual power. It’s a cinematic version of Fight Club, less of an actual narrative and more akin to a Godfrey …
Like the morale of a fable, filmmakers have been trying to capture the ephemeral fantasy of the fairy tale on screen for as long as motion pictures have been an art, and for just as long they’ve turned good stories bad in the attempt. The stylized and heightened reality fairy tales call naturally attracts the …
Pretty, lighthearted, charming and as fleeting as its namesake, Bullet Train is also a pointless exercise in action filmmaking from 25 years ago but with little to offer today. Filled with nameless, unformed characters thrown back in and forth in time in a constant struggle to provide both context and surprise, Bullet Train‘s inability to …
Overloaded, overwrought and overwhelming, The Gray Man movie is the kind of set piece oriented, cliché ridden action spectacle that used to be Hollywood’s bread and butter but has become so rare it’s almost alien when placed before us. Wallowing in light characters and an unbelievable plot as much its stars charisma and some wildly …
Jurassic World Dominion is the perfect Jurassic Park sequel in that it does what all of the films in the series have: tease interesting science fiction concepts with world-changing implications it has no interest in beyond set up for its next inventive set piece. Bombastic, long but frequently thrilling, Jurassic World Dominion succeeds at what …
Bombastic, over the top and unapologetically fun, Top Gun: Maverick is the Platonic ideal of an entertaining studio film, a standard bearer for what those words mean and how they can be achieved. Of course what they do mean is different for different people. Slick, lacking rough edges or idiosyncrasy with dialogue forever in search …
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is a film for no one, interested in neither its source material nor anyone who would have liked said material, embarking on a vain quest for reinvention. The last ten years of tentpole filmmaking have taught us thoroughly the profits and pitfalls of nostalgia. It’s an inducement to the theater …
Once upon a time, there was a brilliant new animation company striving to bring new life and feeling — not to mention dollars — to feature animation. And there was DreamWorks Animation, which was supposed to become that company and didn’t. What it did become was the strange other brand to Disney / Pixar, creating …
Equal parts beautiful and desolate like a part of Iceland’s own volcanic countryside, The Northman is auteur Robert Eggers’ most straightforward film, making up in style what it gives up in the complexity of his previous films. Grabbing relentlessly from the tales of Hamlet and Beowulf, Eggers delves back into his continued curiosity about the …
Focusing on a strong performance from Chris Pine and the reality of the trauma of war and betrayal, Tamrik Saleh’s The Contractor rises above its contemporaries by doing less instead of more. We all revel in an original take on old material and devalue routine plots for the same reason, but that misses out on …
“Sometimes what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. Sometimes it just should have killed you.” Will Ferrell wrote that eleven years ago, and while it was about President George W. Bush at the time, they may as well have been Uncharted which started its long, tortuous assent to the big screen at the same …
The meet cute has been a staple of the romantic comedy since at least Clara Bow bumped into Antonio Moreno. After 100 years of cinema, though, enough variations of it have been tried that even the many worlds map of the romcom multiverse has become a flat circle. The options for most filmmakers now are …
Everything about Hercule Poirot is fake. That is a good thing. It’s true of the man — from the mustache he wears but lies about why to his reasons for doing things — and true of his latest celluloid adventure. Kenneth Branagh‘s adaptation of Death on the Nile puts on as much of a false …
Let’s start with the bad stuff first: The 355 is a terrible movie that fails on almost every level. Let’s continue with the worst stuff: It didn’t have to be. Conceptually, The 355 is perfectly sound if extremely conventional. It’s in the execution that it falls apart, an action film with bad action, inert editing …