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 …
Review
In a world of superheroes, cinematic universes, sequels, prequels, sidequels, and reboots, Nicolas Cage is his own intellectual property. Constantly working, making an on-the-cheap genre film one month and a sensitive actor showcase the next, one cannot say that Cage hasn’t kept it interesting these 40 years since he burst on the film scene. He’s …
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 …
Critics (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) historically dismiss Michael Bay movies. The humor is lowbrow, the noise is cacophonic, the editing feels like the film reels (when they were shot on film) are being sliced up with a razor like a pile of cocaine on Scarface’s desk, and there are more explosions than …
I don’t normally write my reviews with too much personal reflection; I tend to talk about a film’s emotional resonance, whether the filmmakers succeed in their intentions, or if they fall short. I’ll get into a bit of plot synopsis, and I normally wrap it up with examinations of the performances and the film’s overall …
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 …
Matt Reeves’ The Batman is bold, operatic, and swings for the fences. It is huge in scope and goes as big as it needs to be to tell its story. This is not a subtle film, nor does it want to be. Reeves directs this film like it will be his one and only chance …
Gotham City is overrun with crime, corruption, and violence. But the recent arrival of Batman has given the criminal elements of the city pause. Batman can’t be everywhere, but he can make the robbers, thugs, and villains fear every shadow he may be lurking in. Things change when a new serial killer murders the Mayor …
“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 …