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…
Millie doesn’t have a lot going for her. She’s unpopular at school. She’s bullied by other girls as well as her teacher. Her mother is an alcoholic. And as the school mascot, even the football players pick on her. Her only comforts are her friends Nyla and Josh. As if things weren’t bad enough, there’s a serial…
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…
It is perhaps fitting that, like the rest of us right now living through (gesticulating wildly) All This, Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter), and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) in Bill and Ted Face the Music are pining for simpler, happier times. After all, their greatest moments were 25 years ago, when they saw…
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…
Judd Apatow has a long history of “Lovable Losers” in his work. All the way from Freaks and Geeks to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, even in films like This Is 40 and Trainwreck, Apatow tells stories about broken, juvenile characters who are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the real world. Apatow’s also been accused of glossing…
The glass-is-half-empty among us has been decrying the death of cinema for many years, triggered by the increasing focus on reinventing old IP in the face of increasing apathy towards original material. The glass-is-half-full side will respond that the origination of the material matters less than what is done with it, and talented individuals have…
Spring, 1987. I’m a senior in high school. I’m sitting in the back seat of my friend Bill’s lime-green Chevy Nova. We’re in the parking lot of a Kroger’s, and we’re all a little drunk. Some of us more than others; we’ve been drinking beers, and right before we left the party at Heather’s house,…
Somewhere, on the side of a mountain in the Appalachians, a family is gathering for its annual celebration. Somewhere, a family is falling apart. Somewhere, the classic reactions and responses to unconscionable betrayal are turned on their heads. Somewhere, people act out their lives in a fashion both impossible to identify with and unmistakably human….
No film based on a true story is really about its subject, or at least not wholly about it. Sure, there’s a requirement to include the major moments of a life or event and keep the bones of the story in line with history. But the viewpoint of the filmmakers matters as much as the…
Spider-Man: Far From Home is a film caught up in the inconsistencies of grief. It suggests grief both causes individuals to freeze in their pre-trauma state and to attempt to put it behind them come hell or high water. Even as their every action is being caused by their grief, they are also turning their…