Breaking In is definitely not good, but I definitely enjoyed it a lot anyway. Take that for exactly as much as you will, and pay exactly as much attention to the star rating as you think you must, but be aware that the summer of 2018 will be thick with “better” films that I’ll be […]
With Life of the Party, Melissa McCarthy now has seven bona-fide star vehicles to her name stretching back to 2013’s Identity Thief, three of them directed by Paul Feig, and three directed by her husband, Ben Falcone (Identity Thief is itself the outlier, having been directed by Seth Gordon). That’s an atrociously small sample size […]
Every week this 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 one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Melissa McCarthy goes back to college in Life of the Party, and it is amusing because she is incongruously […]
It is, I think, close to being an outright objective truth that insofar as the 1987 cult object Overboard works, it works entirely because Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell have off-the-charts adorable chemistry together, owing in large part to their being a real-life couple. It certainly does not work because of the scenario, which is […]
Let’s get the nasty part out of the way first: Tully has a fantastically misjudged ending. It’s so incredibly bad, in fact, that it gives me hope for cinema. It feels like every last movie gets micro-managed to death, but the last dozen or so minutes of this are so wildly unsatisfying in such immediately […]
Every week this 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 one of the weekend’s wide releases. This (past) week: amnesia means never having to say you’re sorry in Overboard, a movie about how romantic it is to […]
Chalk up another victory for the evergreen “non-Americans understand America better than Americans” genre. Lean on Pete has an English writer-director and an English producer, it was made using only British money, and it is the most clearheaded, unsentimental portrayal of the perilous life of poor Americans living outside of the social mainstream since 2016’s […]
It may very well be the case that Avengers: Infinity War is both the most review-proof movie ever made, and the most review-proof movie that is capable of existing. I don’t mean “review-proof” in the sense that it typically means, that it would still make pots and pots of money even if the reviews were […]
