Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a little bit sloppy and narratively cluttered, it has unexceptional visuals, I didn’t buy either of its lead characters as written and only one of them as performed, and its modestly diverting action setpieces are hindered by how weightless the wall-to-wall CGI bringing them to life is. It is […]
The biggest problem that was always going to face Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that it was never going to have the staggering shock of the truly new and revolutionary. Even if the first sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse were to have a story more expansive and elaborate than that film (and it […]
With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, writer-director James Gunn has achieved something, in my eyes, that I don’t think has ever happened before: he’s completed an entire trilogy of comic book movies where none of the three entries have been a disappointment. Probably the closest we’ve come before now has been the Christopher Nolan […]
It’s not, like, at all hard to identify the core strengths of 2019’s Shazam!: a slightly ramshackle, Amblin-in-the-’80s approach to family-friendly fantasy, and the odd bidirectional chemistry between Jack Dylan Grazer as nerdy teen Freddy Freeman, and Asher Angel and Zachary Levi tag-teaming as, respectively, the scrawny teen and massive superhero versions of Billy Batson, […]
In 2017, John Wick: Chapter 2 opened by showing footage from the 1924 Buster Keaton comedy Sherlock Jr., one of the greatest stunt-driven movies of all time, and the gesture was an obvious, swaggering brag: “what we’re up to here is just as good as Keaton”. And for the next two hours, director Chad Stahelski […]
The low-hanging fruit first: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is complete garbage as an Ant-Man movie. 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp are two of the most perfectly-matched films in the vast corpus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, now arriving at its 31st feature film, providing almost identical experiences, and in their offbeat […]
The Woman King suffers from only one seriously unanswerable flaw, in my estimation, and it is unfortunately a pretty significant one given what the film is. Namely, its scenes of 19th Century warfare, using a mixture of guns, traditional African tribal weaponry, and what I greatly suspect are some weapons much too fanciful to be […]
Athena is representative of a trend in contemporary French cinema that I like to call banlieue porn, films taking place in Paris’ poorer, darker suburbs (les banlieues) and focusing on the lives of crime and violence that their predominantly young, immigrant, and Muslim population purportedly faces every day. Such films walk a fine line between […]
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 […]
In the thirteen years since James Cameron’s last new feature, Avatar, I have increasingly come to treasure his particular mode of popcorn filmmaking, which I feel didn’t used to be rare, but basically has been dead as dead can be for all of those thirteen years. It is a mode of complete, unyielding sincerity, mixed […]
The most obvious way to sum up Violent Night – and when I say “most obvious”, I mean “so obvious that the film itself does so, explicitly” – is that it combines modern cinema’s two foremost Christmas classics that aren’t really in any significant way about Christmas, 1988’s Die Hard and 1990’s Home Alone, and […]
To be fair to the makers of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, from Marvel Studios capo Kevin Feige to director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and all the way on, they were facing a no-win situation. Chadwick Boseman, the charismatic star of the 2018 Zeitgeist-dominating smash hit Black Panther, died tragically young of cancer at the age of 43 […]
