Director Josh Greenbaum’s previous film, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, hit at a certain time during the pandemic, where people weren’t going to theaters, so studios were releasing films through streaming and having very successful engagement. Barb and Star was funny, quirky, and different, but I have the feeling that if things…
Heartwarming and exciting but also overstuffed and tripping over its own feet, Blue Beetle is a frequently charming, frequently frustrating attempt to re-write (or at least re-aim) the classic superhero narrative and intermittently succeeding. When it does succeed it flies high, pulling in pieces from successful forebears like Spider-Man and Iron Man and spinning them…
Confident and competent, Neill Blomkamp‘s adaptation of the popular racing game is a 100-minute commercial for Sony which still manages to have more under the hood than you would expect. Treading the well-covered ground of the sports film, the Gran Turismo movie isn’t interested in re-inventing either that genre or the video game adaptation; merely…
Inspired by the recent success of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Paramount has done yet another relaunch of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise with the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Assembling an impressive voice cast, and giving us a new, artistically drawn aesthetic, much of Mutant Mayhem feels straight ripped from the pages…
Author’s note: This Haunted Mansion review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist. If you are interested in helping those workers on strike, please consider giving to the Entertainment Community Fund. After a weekend of box…
Barbie has come to signify many things. A friend. A foe. A token of feminism. The reinforcer of feminine ideals. For myself, she’s come to represent childhood innocence. The time I forced myself to grow up and leave behind such childish things. This fashion doll created by Ruth Handler has spent decades taking the world…
Author’s note: This Oppenheimer review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist. If you are interested in helping those workers on strike, please consider giving to the Entertainment Community Fund. Oppenheimer is stunning. Christopher Nolan‘s latest…
Author’s note: This Talk to Me review was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist. If you are interested in helping those workers on strike, please consider giving to the Entertainment Community Fund. With Talk to Me,…
Mission: Impossible idealizes Tom Cruise and his willingness to commit increasingly-dangerous stunts the way Mission: Impossible idealizes Ethan Hunt and his willingness to save the world. The series is a frequently-amazing vehicle for both, filled with spectacular set pieces and the perception that if those are delivered on the rest of the film can be…
Most sequels operate under the Law of Diminishing Returns, but not the Mission: Impossible franchise, at least, not since Ghost Protocol. I enjoyed the first three well enough, but once Ghost Protocol hit, and with each entry since, this series has strived to top itself in spectacle, story, stunts, spontaneity, and sincerity. Tom Cruise and…
Joy Ride, Adele Lim‘s extended road trip through China, is an enticing meditation on the complexity of identity within the immigrant experience that is unfortunately saddled with banal modern comedic tropes that undercut rather than enhance the journey. The phrase ‘immigrant experience’ itself seems overused at this point, a short-hand attempt to quantify a reality…
Let’s be honest and lay the cards on the table – the Indiana Jones movies are a trilogy. Yes, there are five movies in this trilogy, so the math doesn’t quite check out, but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny are more epilogues than…
It’s easy to put charismatic actors in a romantic setting and let them quip at each other. It’s difficult to make anyone care for them or their plight or generate genuine charm. It’s easy to create gags that tug and pull at the edges of societal norms, aiming to shock through sheer outrageousness. It’s difficult to resist…
Vital Thrills recently got a chance to attend a press conference with the cast and crew of Marvel Studios’ Secret Invasion, the new series on Disney+. In the show, debuting on June 21, Nick Fury learns of a clandestine invasion of Earth by a faction of shapeshifting Skrulls. Fury joins his allies, including Everett Ross,…
In 1969, Henry Jones Jr. is at a low point in his life. Well past his glory days, he now is disrespected by his younger neighbors, slowed down by aches and pains, forced into retirement by his college, and ignored by his students. Indy is a man out of time and the world moves on…
Vital Thrills recently got a chance to attend the press conference for Disney and Pixar’s Elemental and talked to stars Leah Lewis and Mamoudou Athie, as well as director Peter Sohn, producer Denise Ream, and singer/songwriter Ari Leff (Lauv). Now playing in theaters, Pixar’s Elemental is set in Element City, where fire-, water-, land- and…
For nearly three decades, writer/director Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Royal Tenenbaums) has been cutting his movies from his own peculiar cloth. His latest sojourn into his uniquely stylized blend of comedy and cartoonish art direction is Asteroid City, a Russian-doll narrative of a group of a disparate eccentrics dropped into a desert…
I’ll be the first to admit that, when I initially looked at Elemental in my inbox, I was hesitant. Over the years, Pixar has struggled a bit with its films, some of which suffered from being shoved onto Disney+ during peak COVID but also due to execution of ideas. From the lackluster Lightyear to the…
It seems hard to believe that everything that could be coaxed out of a world-spanning story of giant alien robots battling for supremacy has been even across seven films, but here we are. The newest attempt to revive the Transformers franchise remixes and regurgitates a lot of the pieces from the previous films, attempting to…
A couple of years after the events of Justice League, Barry Allen is starting to master his powers as The Flash. Unfortunately, not much else is going well for him. He feels like a fourth-rate member of the superhero team, he is not respected at his job as a forensic scientist, and his love life…