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…
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…
Stylish, calculating, and beautiful with a pair of perfectly-pitched performances from its two leads, Cruella is an apt reflection of the life its heroine (Emma Stone) wants to lead, but maybe a decade too late in getting there. A prequel humanizing a villain from a 50-year-old film who literally has ‘devil’ as part of her…
As Hollywood has been slowly overrun with more and more superhero films, many pages of digital ink have been spilled about how and why that has been so. A lot of those think pieces take the stance that the superhero film is childish, homogenous, and risk-averse as opposed to the adult-oriented entertainment studios used to…
If ten years ago, I had made a list of sentences I would never write in a review, surely ”enjoying a Bob Odenkirk action movie” would have to have been one of them. And yet that reality has come to pass and mostly successfully, if somehow both broad and shallow. Odenkirk’s reinvention as a solid…
The biopic is a surprisingly elastic storytelling tool. In theory, it exists to present an overview of a life. But what is life? It can be tragic, uplifting, or enthralling, and often, all of those together within the same span of years. By the same token, the biopic can be a tragedy, a warning, a…
Beautiful, sad, and distant, Land is like the mountainous horizon. Would-be woodswoman Edee (Robin Wright) spends much of her time gazing at a picture-perfect artifice that may be full of significance but is just as likely a mere empty view. On the surface, it is an elegantly paced tone poem of reflection, juxtaposing the uncaring…
It would be very easy to write The Marksman off as an empty action thriller playing around with evil émigré tropes like a child with a hand grenade because that’s mostly what it is. A low-key chase film built on the personal salvation of a child in trouble, it plays with stereotypes in a way…
Promising Young Woman is a dive into the deep end of cynicism. That is not a pejorative or a negative. It is simply a statement of the reality viewed by its writer/director and the scores of individuals she is speaking for. A world where painful, life-changing events are passed off as ‘youthful indiscretions’ that a…
If Hollywood is our guide, great natural disasters have no greater purpose than to focus on a long-standing interpersonal conflict (usually a married couple) and give the participants one big chance to clear it up. Mother Nature isn’t just the personification of our system of physical laws making sure the world works the way it…
We’re surrounded by so much news these days, mountains of it at our fingertips, that we forget not only how difficult it once was to receive it but the power it actually had. The news wasn’t (and isn’t) just words, it’s proof of civilization. That the world exists, that people beyond our immediate experience exist…
The time has now come. With all options for the ’80s and ’90s nostalgia used up, we must now look to the 2000s and early 2010s to re-feed us our youthful reminisces. Actually, that’s far too cynical. There’s nothing nostalgic about this seven-years-later sequel. The Croods: A New Age is a simple matter of an…
For a character and a comedian whose brands were both built on smashing expectations of not just the permissible but the expected, it’s strange that the second Borat film is exactly what you’d think it would be. Again, taking easy potshots at the conservative America it skewered 15 years ago, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm attempts some…
Honest Thief is not honest at all. It sells itself as the latest in the modern line of post-Taken Liam Neeson action vehicles. The ones that trade on his gravitas and high-octane set pieces in lieu of coherent plots or strong dialogue. Honest Thief only has half of that, with a budget and production design…
Adapting a classic with a classic reputation is always tricky. Almost as tricky as a director with a settled style stretching himself into new directions. Both are treacherous, filled with pitfalls and observers eager to point out how the earlier stuff was better. And there’s a lot of risk, too, because there’s a lot of…
Aaron Sorkin is a writer’s writer. That doesn’t mean he routinely writes excellent dialogue (though he often does) or complexly crafted characters (though he sometimes does) or even that his work is accoladed or influential to other writers (though some of it is). It means he does what all writers do, only more so. Sorkin…
Unhinged is unapologetic trash. That’s not a bad thing. Good trash can be great. But there’s not much worse than bad trash. Unhinged is not good trash. Its story is rote, and its characters are one-dimensional, giving the briefest of lip service to their inner motivations in order to get them in place for its…
In this series, I look back at some fantastic hidden gems that have been lost over the years and deserve to be rediscovered. We’ll kick things off with Night People, which opened in theaters in March of 1954. Night People If you ask a hundred different people what Gregory Peck‘s best role was, probably ninety…
With this Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feature, we’re taking a look back at Lucasfilm’s other giant franchise and the ways it shaped the modern blockbuster. Stay tuned for all the latest Indiana Jones 5 news here. INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL The first decade of Indiana…
Sketch comedy is hard. Really, all comedy is hard, but sketch comedy is really hard – getting long in and out in a (hopefully) short period without losing any part of the build or punchline. And while there is no reason old sketch comedy writers shouldn’t also be good comedy film writers, the reality is…