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 …
Joshua Starnes
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 …