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: in addition to having the most soullessly branded title of any superhero movie this year, DC League of Super-Pets […]
To begin with, I find the very title of DC League of Super-Pets unpleasantly provocative. Not the League of Super-Pets part; that’s mostly just describing the content, though I might wonder why the film bothered to so subtly rename the comic book Legion of Super-Pets. Probably because Warner Bros. assumed (and with reason) that movie […]
There are things in Thor: Love and Thunder – the fourth movie to exclusively focus on the Marvel Comics version of the Norse god Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, who thus becomes the first individual character to headline a tetralogy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – that are pretty damn good. And conversely, there are […]
Nine years and two months separated the releases 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful and 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, both directed by Sam Raimi. He made no other features between them (though he did some television work, and produced quite a bit), making this by far the longest break between projects […]
If you, like me, are of the opinion that there’s nothing more enervating to watch in 2020s American filmmaking than a strictly formulaic comic book movie, Morbius has a surprise for you. It manages to do something that I’m a bit surprised it’s possible for a film made for this much money and with this […]
There’s no argument I can imagine that director Matt Reeves’s The Batman, the first in what’s undoubtedly meant to be a new ongoing series built around DC Comics’ second-most iconic superhero, is “the best” Batman film to date. But I think no argument is necessary that it is “the most” Batman film, and I’m including […]
TIM: The romantic comedy was a mainstay of the commercial film marketplace for decades, stretching all the way back to the silent era, but in the 21st Century, the genre has taken a terrible beating. Theatrically-released romcoms have become quite a rare beast indeed, which is the first thing that makes the new Marry Me […]
This review addresses, with a fairly free hand, plot elements that I, for one, wouldn’t really consider to be “spoilers” for Spider-Man: No Way Home, but I imagine somebody hoping to enter the film wholly pure and ready for surprises would be outraged to learn some of these things. Proceed accordingly. For a movie that represents […]
If one is adapting the work of comic book artist and author Jack Kirby, particularly the era of Jack Kirby when he was obsessed with Chariots of the Gods and trying to create extraordinary new cosmologies for first the DC and then the Marvel universe, I think the obviously correct thing to do would be […]
The 2019 animated version of The Addams Family is remarkably free of any positive elements, including the one thing that should be considered the non-negotiable baseline for any media adaptation of Charles Addams’s macabre New Yorker cartoons: a genuine streak of cruel morbidity. It’s a children’s movie, and that of course puts a ceiling on […]
In discussing any long-running series that doesn’t exactly swing from pole to pole, qualitywise, one of the trickiest parts in reviewing the individual entries can be figuring out where to start: what specifically makes this film different from all of those films? Happily, then, Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft – which premiered in 1998 […]
I had a short conversation with a friend about Venom: Let There Be Carnage that seemed pretty all-encompassing: he felt that the best parts of 2018’s Venom were the scenes where Tom Hardy played off of Michelle Williams, and since there are fewer of those in Let There Be Carnage, he thought it was a […]
