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 it 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…
Like the moral 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 naturally attract the visual…
Pretty, lighthearted, charming, and as fleeting as its namesake, Bullet Train is also a pointless exercise in action filmmaking from 25 years ago but has 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 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 star charisma and some wildly over-the-top action sequences,…
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 setting 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 mean is different for different people. Slick, lacking rough edges or idiosyncrasy with dialogue forever in search of…
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is a film for no one. The film is 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…
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 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 either to…
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…
The third film tends to be tough for Spider-Man. The third Sam Raimi film suffered from competing priorities between filmmaker and producers, resulting in multiple entries worth of story being crammed into one movie. The third Marc Webb Spider-Man topped that by never even happening after making the same mistake as the Raimi series, just…
Once upon a time, the format for Disney Animation was simple and unchanging – take a well-known fable or children’s story, add high-level ballads and funny animal or magic characters, mix thoroughly, and produce fun kids’ perennials. In reality, it missed almost as often as it hit, but years of VCR babysitting and endless home…
With one or two really, really well-known exceptions, it’s become the kiss of death for a fantasy sci-fi epic to open with a scroll of exposition. Not because it presages the filmmaker’s concerns that audiences won’t understand enough of the nuances of the backstory to engage with the prime narrative properly. But because the opening…
The conventional wisdom in film (even, or even especially, action/adventure entertainment) is that formula is bad, an exemplar of laziness with a focus more on product than art. The other side is that the formula easily draws audiences in, and breaking it without warning is also bad because it will drive your audience away. No…
A musical, particularly a musical with strong upbeat numbers from the team behind The Greatest Showman and La La Land, built around teen depression and suicide, is a mighty big swing. It’s such a delicate topic it’s going to land differently for everyone, and musical drama is a genre that, at best, favors big melodrama…
It started out with a pretty simple idea, right? Create one night a year where everyone can do whatever they want in order to blow off their worst impulses so that they will live as peaceable, law-abiding citizens for the rest of the year. What could go wrong? Obviously, quite a lot and over its…