Perhaps a better title for Beast would be Prey, but that one’s already taken this year. When a group of African poachers kills off a lion’s pride for their pelts, the one remaining survivor goes after the rest of the humans in the area. When a doctor, his two children, and the local game warden…
Jordan Peele’s third film, Nope, is another intense thriller, full of context, theme, and flourish. Comparisons to Steven Spielberg or John Carpenter are accurate; Peele uses similar tricks and skills to entertain, frighten, and captivate audiences. He also has a need to tell stories full of metaphor and social awareness, but he also doesn’t want…
Jurassic World Dominion is the perfect Jurassic Park sequel in that it does what all of the films in the series have: tease interesting science fiction concepts with world-changing implications it has no interest in beyond setting up for its next inventive set piece. Bombastic, long but frequently thrilling, Jurassic World Dominion succeeds at what…
Several years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, dinosaurs have spread throughout the world. Clashes between mankind, modern wildlife, and prehistoric beasts have escalated. Black markets dealing in dinosaurs begin to thrive. Governments and environmental groups do their best to intervene and relocate the beasts to sanctuaries, but it is a difficult task….
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…
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…
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…
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…
With F9 (and let’s face it, this series is just a harbinger of what is to come – all our movies will eventually become mere letters and numbers, like some strange form of Bingo. I am especially excited to see K6, A17, and W23 sometime in the near future) the Fast & Furious franchise has…
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…
If ten years ago, I had made a list of sentences I would never write in a review, surely ”enjoying a Bob Odenkirk action movie” would have to have been one of them. And yet that reality has come to pass and mostly successfully, if somehow both broad and shallow. Odenkirk’s reinvention as a solid…
We’re surrounded by so much news these days, mountains of it at our fingertips, that we forget not only how difficult it once was to receive it but the power it actually had. The news wasn’t (and isn’t) just words, it’s proof of civilization. That the world exists, that people beyond our immediate experience exist…
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…
It’s been a long time since there’s been a film iteration of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man with Paul Verhoeven last giving it a go 20 years ago with The Hollow Man, starring Kevin Bacon. Universal Pictures has been trying for a while to get something going for one of their Classic Movie Monsters, although…
There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are a lot of mediocre movies. And sometimes, just sometimes, there are movies that reach the Nietzschean ideal of the Übermensch, existing beyond silly ideas like good and evil. I looked into the abyss, and Cats was staring back at me. If I were less professional,…
As a war film, 1917 doesn’t have much in the way of new ideas to offer — and maybe there aren’t any for the genre now — but it’s so elegantly crafted it takes the breath away. The story is simple: a pair of infantrymen have been given a message to deliver across nine treacherous…
There are good films, there are bad films, and there are the worst films — the cinematic equivalents of a five-talent ballplayer who never gets out of the minors. They sound good on paper but just never live up to their potential. Last Christmas is one of those films that should be so much better…
Another important aspect of Sam Mendes’ 1917, besides the amazing camerawork to make it all a single shot, is the two soldiers that the story follows. The two 1917 soldiers include Schofield, played by George MacKay, and Blake, played by Dean-Charles Chapman. MacKay is the better-known of the two actors, having co-starred with Viggo Mortensen in…
Last week, Vital Thrills attended a special New York Comic Con panel held by Universal Pictures to preview Sam Mendes’ upcoming World War I film 1917, which will be released on Christmas Day. Mendes was joined on the panel by co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns, producer Pippa Harris, cinematographer Roger Deakins and two of the primary cast: George…