Over the course of its 27-years-and-counting lifespan – a geological epoch, by summertime movie standards – the Mission: Impossible movies have tried on many different guises and been many different things. But one of the things they have been the most consistently, going back at least to the free-climbing and knife-against-the-eyeball scenes in 2000’s Mission: […]
Generally speaking, I prefer to watch films with as little foreknowledge as possible. Don’t seek out trailers, don’t browse movie-news sites; if I’m reading someone else’s review, it’s because I’ve either seen the movie or have pretty firmly decided that I’d rather not. There are many advantages to this approach—the joy of discovery chief among […]
It’s impressive, in its way: 2022 managed to produce a worse wide-release film than the whole of 2021 on literally its very first try. The 355, the first movie of the new year, makes virtually no right choices, and arguably started that habit before pre-production, before development even, when 355 star/producer Jessica Chastain and director […]
A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga Written by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge Premiered 28 September, 2021 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE I have to give it credit for being a basically perfect summary of the entire movie: it’s much too long, it […]
Intermittently throughout the summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a major new release. This week: after 25 years, Space Jam: A New Legacy returns the classic animated figures of the Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies series […]
Black Widow is, on balance, a largely blank experience: devoid of anything particularly obnoxious other than a 133-minute running time that it seems to view as an obligation rather than an opportunity for expansive storytelling, pretty formulaic in every single element of its storytelling, packed with hollow action scenes that don’t hurt to watch, nor […]
Everything that is worst about F9 – or to give its mildly bizarre, never-seen-onscreen full title, F9: The Fast Saga – is exactly the same as everything that makes it such a wonderfully ludicrous, over-the-top joy to behold. As the first honest-to-God watch-it-on-the-biggest screen possible Hollywood popcorn blockbuster in over a year, since the repulsive […]
There has been some muttering about whether or not it is strictly correct to call The Mole Agent a “documentary”, and to this I have only one response: I don’t really care what we call it, as long as we acknowledge that it’s charming and good. But also, it’s totally a documentary; it’s just that […]
Director Olivier Assayas has made world-class masterpieces, like Irma Vep (1996); he has made solidly routine arthouse fodder, like Something in the Air (2012); he has made films that I think simply do not work, like Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). But one thing he had not made prior to Wasp Network in 2019, or […]
As inevitably and irresistibly as the sun rising and the tide coming in, any actor who has enormous muscles and an even marginally acceptable sense of comic timing will eventually make a children’s comedy that has him pratfall in the face of a preternaturally self-assured tween. And doom has now come to wrestler-turned-character actor Dave […]
So, Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite! You’ve just got to love the stubborn optimism of that exclamation point, by the way. Like we’ll be convinced that it’s a bubbly, fun bit of high-energy nonsense if our brain reflexively rises up in volume as we read it Also, I cannot shake the feeling that it […]
I would never have thought of this on my own, but now that I’ve been put in mind of it, it makes perfect sense that American International Pictures and Amicus Productions would team up together. You could never say that they occupy the same spot in their respective ecosystems, because the Hollywood and British film […]
