You’ve got to hand it to the Walt Disney Company: in only four years and two days, they managed to completely slaughter the golden goose of Star Wars. Like, the strongest brand name in the history of popcorn cinema. That Star Wars. I say this on the occasion of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, because what the hell else are you going to say? The film completes the “Sequel […]

November tends to be a bloated month for movies – family releases, Oscar hopefuls, and the beginning of Blockbuster Season 2.0 all jockeying for space – but this year seems especially so, and with a really peculiar mix of movies, too. I don’t even know how to make a meta-narrative out of this, so let’s just jump straight into it. 2.11.2018 Speaking of bloat, the first weekend of the month […]

Quite independently of the quality of any of the films in question, the Cloverfield series-if-that’s-the-word-for-it has taken one of the strangest routes imaginable to willing itself into existence. Cloverfield was always just Cloverfield, and that was it for eight years, when an unrelated in-production film titled The Cellar was mildly retooled and made into 10 Cloverfield Lane, with no significant plot affinities with the prior film. Now an unrelated screenplay by […]

Of all the movies over the years that have brazenly ripped off Alien, Life sure is one of them. At least it has this going on in its favor: it cost more than a lot of its brethren, and so it looks shinier and sleeker. If there are to be no inventive moments and no thrills that aren’t at least secondhand, we can at least have some tolerably good spectacle. […]

Wouldja look at that, hire some filmmakers who actually give a shit about Star Trek, and poof! you have yourself a perfectly solid Star Trek movie. It only took three tries – and getting J.J. Abrams hired away to direct a film in that other space franchise – but the neo-Trek prequel/reboot series that started in 2009 with the simply-titled Star Trek has finally turned out a movie that resembles […]

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: because nobody stopped them when the dragged god-damned dinosaurs into the ice age two movies ago, the makers of Ice Age: Collision Course have seen fit to make a movie in which Pleistocene megafauna […]

Because anything is better than actually looking Independence Day: Resurgence square in the face and talking about it, we’ve got a cool little conversation starting up in the comments section of my review of same: what are the best and worst summer movie seasons in the last few years? For me, this has also raised questions of how one even thinks about the quality or lack thereof in the Great […]

For this week’s edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel has gone as current as he could dare, selecting the gargantuan 2015 hit Star Wars: The Force Awakens for this week’s subject. It’s an intriguing choice, and not one, I’m afraid, that gets me terribly jazzed up to hunt for a shot. There are many very lovely, very iconic images from the film, but I don’t know, I’ve […]

I don’t know when the statute of limitations for spoilers runs out on a movie that makes crazy-ass wackyland fantasy amount of money in its first weekend, but I do know that the internet is full of geeks, and there are are almost surely literally hundreds of reviews of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that say the exact same spoiler-free version of the thing I would say if I had […]

Ordinarily, December is the month for stock-taking with all of the prestige pictures. This year it is, well, not. We might the month that movie, and then a couple dozen things that aren’t that movie. Of course we care about some of them, and we do not care about some others, and everybody will have their own take on which is which – but everybody is thinking about that movie, […]

I am about to make a patently unfair comparison, but the job of the reviewer is to be honest, and this has been my overriding feeling for the past couple of days: there’s ultimately nothing that The Martian does that 1995’s Apollo 13 and 2013’s Gravity didn’t already do. And they both did it better. None of which isn’t to say that The Martian isn’t a perfectly charming, entertaining brainy-adjacent […]

There has been some effort online to stress Damon Lindelof’s presence as co-writer of Tomorrowland and thus somehow save the reputation of the film’s director and other writer, Brad Bird. Which presumes in the first place that Tomorrowland is bad enough to justify insulating the beloved auteur from it, and I think that’s far from an objective truth, even though it’s obviously the worst of his five features. But more […]