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 …
Joshua Starnes
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, …
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 …
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 …