Eddie Murphy is back. The best Eddie Murphy movies are those where it feels like he has something to prove. It’s been a few years since we’ve had a completely engaged Eddie. His strongest films have always been those when Eddie has a little glint in his eye right before he lays his cards on…
These days, science fiction films aren’t necessarily about the ideas but the spectacle. Many have several hundred-million-dollar budgets, gigantic CGI moments, and actors who work against green screens all day playing pretend on a wide scale. And while those films done right are perfectly enjoyable, it feels like something has been lost. Great character work,…
I have been obsessed with Alien since I was nine years old, and my parents refused to take me to a movie theater to see it. For Christmas that year, they bought me a book full of shots from the film, and I closely examined every single frame I could, from the face hugger sequence to…
H. P. Lovecraft is a notoriously difficult author to adapt to film. There have been a thousand riffs off his work over the years, with varying degrees of success, but to directly bring his work to the screen can be problematic at best. Back when authors were paid for every word, during the era of…
Young Jojo Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is a good little Nazi. He worships Adolf Hitler – so much so that he imagines Adolf (Taika Waititi) giving him advice during times of difficulty. In Germany, during the waning days of World War II, Jojo and his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), try to manage an existence together,…
Man is a solitary creature. If there is anything to take from James Gray’s loving and lovingly strange 2001: A Space Odyssey hat tap, it’s the aching hole inside individuals that no amount of exploration or discovery can fill. That may not be particularly comforting to fans of human scientific advancement, but its combination of…
It Chapter Two is a glorious mess. When the decision was made to split Stephen King’s It into two films, it seemed a sensible choice. The novel is over 1,100 pages long, and even the space of two lengthy films couldn’t possibly cover everything. King’s novel not only dives into the characters of the Loser’s Club…
It’s a rare occurrence when you watch a film and realize that you’ve spoken out loud about it before it’s over. I apologize to the person sitting next to me, but I think he totally understood. There was a moment while watching Joker when the screen went black and a breathless “wow” came out of my…
Surely, the most dreaded words in all of feature film development must be “it needs a new direction.” [Followed closely by “I have a few notes”]. Not that searching for a new direction is bad; some fantastic films have come from creatives throwing out what came before and, in the process, re-discovering an original truth….
I still remember the illustrations. Drawn originally by Stephen Gammell, I remember the feeling of my breath seizing as I stared at the screaming scarecrow on the cover of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and thinking to myself, “Nope.” It would be a couple more years until I would actually conquer my fear and…
The image is compelling: a bride in her wedding dress with a gun in her hands and ammo strapped around her body. You know exactly what you’re in for… or do you? I tried to stay as far away from the original trailer as I could before I watched Ready or Not, starring Samara Weaving,…
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is exactly what you think it is – a film with a ridiculously convoluted title. It’s also big, dumb, loud, and frequently great fun. It’s the kind of movie Michael Bay thinks he’s making but isn’t. It’s also frequently not the film it thinks it is. Mainly because…
If it is indeed true that Quentin Tarantino is going to retire after his tenth film (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, for all intents and purposes, is supposed to be his ninth), he could be dangerously close to proving the old adage that it is better to burn out than to fade away. Not…
Stuber feels almost revolutionary in a summer where every film seems to have earth-shattering stakes and where the simple pleasures of a good belly laugh and solid chemistry between actors happy to be there seem like the movie staples of a bygone era. To whip out an old critic’s cliché, they really don’t make them…
Before I start this The Lion King review, I want to address something so you know where I stand. There has been some discussion online lately about whether or not people are fans of Disney live-action remakes. Though I’ve enjoyed reading both sides, I have loved some and not others. I’m also okay with changes…
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…
It’s difficult not to compare Ari Aster’s Midsommar to his previous film, Hereditary; in both, Aster uses grief as an entry point into explorations of horror and despair. In the case of Midsommar, that grief hits directly and quickly as Dani (Florence Pugh) is given some devastating news that destroys her world as she knows it. Her…
The great philosopher Tyler Durden once said, “The things we possess end up possessing us.” Taking that sort of glib pseudo-philosophy seriously is bound to backfire, but someone has anyway, so we may as well grapple with it. The possession under discussion is the haunted doll Annabelle, which has been traveling in search of a…
It is difficult not to get teary-eyed when I think about the Toy Story franchise. It is a movie franchise that I quite literally grew up on, with the first movie coming out in 1995, right when I was a young pre-schooler. And, while I may not be the biggest fan of sequels to animated films, the Toy…
The new Netflix film Murder Mystery, starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, is released today. In the film, when a NYC cop (Adam Sandler) finally takes his wife (Jennifer Aniston) on a long-promised European trip, a chance meeting on the flight with a mysterious man (Luke Evans) gets them invited to an intimate family gathering on…