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…
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…
Evil Dead has a strong legacy. With each installment to the franchise, fans get to see how the mythos build while also reveling in delightfully fiendish gore and effects. A decade has passed since the last Evil Dead film, a film I will defend until my dying day, and we now have Evil Dead Rise….
Not long after the events of Shazam!, Billy Batson and his foster siblings are still trying to figure out the whole superhero thing… with mixed results. While they manage to save many lives, there’s plenty of collateral damage along the way. Billy does his best to lead his new superhero team, but he has his…
Magic Mike’s Last Dance may be the worst film Steven Soderbergh has ever made. Which isn’t to say it is bad, Soderbergh may be incapable of making an out and out bad film even with some of his low budget experiments of the 2000s. But it is thoroughly mediocre in a way Soderbergh has never…
Black Adam is cotton candy – it’s cloyingly sweet, disappears after a few seconds, and nothing that is full of sugar and chemicals can be good for you in the long run if you eat it constantly. This is another entry in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU, MCU, who can keep up these days), and…
Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) is happily married to Jack Chambers (Harry Styles). Every day, she wakes up, sends Jack to work at the enigmatic Victory Project, cleans house, cooks Jack dinner, welcomes him home with a glass of liquor and a loving embrace, goes to bed, often after making passionate love, wakes up the next…
I saw Elvis Presley live in concert. It was March 1974, at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. I was four years old. I don’t remember it very well, but I do have flashes and images in my mind. I remember seeing my parents losing their minds, even though the stage, to my tiny four-year-old…
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…
So what, exactly, is The Matrix Resurrections? Is it a reboot, a remake, or a sequel? Well, it’s all three. After almost twenty years, we get both a progression of the story from The Matrix Revolutions and a new beginning of sorts, where everything gets wiped clean. It’s both a continuation and a commentary –…
Dune (or Dune Part One as the opening credits assure us) is a towering cinematic achievement, with stunning visuals, confident direction, impressive art and sound design, a score that blasts you through the theater (or living room) wall, and performances that pull directly from Frank Herbert’s epic novel. However, Dune is also half a movie….
So, in reviewing The Many Saints of Newark, this must be stated up front – all I’ve seen of The Sopranos is the first episode and the last episode. There’s probably a metric ton of story between the two, and it’s a show that obviously has a huge cultural impact. Even without seeing the show,…
When it comes to my personal taste in musicals, I can sum it up in a phrase: “Go big or go home.” Movie musicals play with huge emotions, a sweeping grandeur of elegant conflict that can only be expressed through music, song, and dance; full of bodies moving in unison, and what begins as a…
Vital Thrills recently got a chance to participate in the press day for New Line Cinema’s The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. The film is the highly-anticipated sequel to The Conjuring (2013) and The Conjuring 2 (2016). The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It reveals a chilling story of terror, murder, and unknown evil that shocked even…
In Warner Bros.’ new Mortal Kombat movie, we follow a new character named Cole Young (Lewis Tan). He’s a washed-up MMA fighter with a wife and daughter. He’s had a dragon marking from birth, and he assumes it’s just a birthmark. What it actually is will change his life as he’s pulled into a battle…
The biopic is a surprisingly elastic storytelling tool. In theory, it exists to present an overview of a life. But what is life? It can be tragic, uplifting, or enthralling, and often, all of those together within the same span of years. By the same token, the biopic can be a tragedy, a warning, a…
A funny thing happened on the way to my press screening of Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (and if you think I’m typing that title full-on again in this review, well, we’ll see how the word count goes), and I blame myself entirely. I didn’t know that Birds of Prey…
Waaaayyyy back in what we call the Golden Age of Hollywood, it wouldn’t be unusual for studios to only release 50 or 60 films and maybe only a few more than 100 worldwide. Now, that number is generally surpassed by the end of the first quarter of each year. With that giant upswing in content…
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…