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Joshua Starnes

Joshua Starnes has been writing about film and the entertainment industry since 2004 and served as the President of the Houston Film Critics Society from 2012 to 2019. In 2015, he became a co-owner/publisher of Red 5 Comics and, in 2018, wrote the series "Kulipari: Dreamwalker" for Netflix. In between, he continues his lifelong quest to find THE perfect tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich combination.

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 …

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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, …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

Read More about The Bad Guys Review: DreamWorks’ Animated Action Comedy

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 …

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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 …

Read More about Spider-Man: No Way Home Movie Review

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 …

Read More about Encanto Review: Disney’s Magical Family Tale

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 …

Read More about Eternals Review: The Chloé Zhao-Directed Marvel Studios Film

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 …

Read More about The Forever Purge Review: The Rules Are Broken

Once upon a time, there was a group of underprivileged youth making ends meet by hijacking trucks to steal home electronics. Then one thing led to another until they one day found themselves racing a submarine on an ice flow in order to save the world. Granted, the phrase ‘one thing led to another’ is doing …

Read More about F9 Review: Here’s What We Thought of the Newest Fast & Furious Film

There are two types of filmed fantasy (in a structural sense): the ones that explain all of their rules up front and in detail (hopefully because it will matter to the narrative) and the ones that don’t. It is personal preference which one is better, but the latter, by its nature, offers a more magical …

Read More about Luca Review: Pixar’s New Disney+ Film