Jurassic World Dominion fucks up absolutely everything it’s possible to fuck up. It even fucks up how to put a colon in its own title. To my knowledge, the oldest film to have staged a scene of a dinosaur attacking a human is Willis O’Brien’s partially-lost The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, from 1918. So by […]
First, the positivity: the direct-to-Disney+ film Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, a sort of update-reboot-remake of the 1989 cartoon TV show of the same name, is so much better than I expected it to be. It’s still bad in many ways and good in virtually none, but the standard of comparison here is 2021’s Space […]
In the very first scene of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, screenwriters J.K. Rowling and Steven Kloves make “Dumbledore is gay” canonical in the Harry Potter universe. At the far side of 142 impossibly unhurried minutes, this will turn out to have been the most consequential narrative development of the film. After three films, […]
There is something indescribably soothing about the existence of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in its current form. And that starts right with the fact that it’s been titled Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and not, like, Sonic the Hedgehog: Knuckle Down or Sonic the Hedgehog: Tails I Win, or Sonic the Hedgehog: In the Shadow of […]
Thirteen is a pretty cool number of entries for a horror franchise to arrive at: it is the spooky number, and thus very auspicious. And when the Witchcraft movies became the very first horror series ever to arrive at its thirteenth entry in 2008, with Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen, the series minders seemed […]
There have now been eight sequels, remakes, prequels, or prequels-to-remakes of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror-redefining masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I think it is relatively easy to argue that every single one of them is bad. Hooper’s own 1986 follow-up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has its enthusiastic partisans, among whom I don’t number, […]
The new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel Death on the Nile written by Michael Green and directed by Kenneth Branagh is an almost perfect lateral move, quality-wise from the 2017 adaptation of Christie’s 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express, also written by Green and directed by Branagh. In a sense, this already speaks […]
Whether or not The Matrix Resurrections works very well – I am generally of the mind that it doesn’t really, though it is a better film than either The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions, and that’s sort of the only target it needed to hit – what cannot be taken away from it is […]
Twelve entries is quite a good run, but I think at long last, with Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent, the Witchcraft series finally found its bottom. This is recklessly optimistic, I know, but every other time one of the releases in the franchise was much, much worse than its predecessors, it felt […]
1984’s Ghostbusters is a pretty damn good movie – prone to being over-praised by nostalgic fans, but pretty damn good – and it doesn’t seem like it’s all that difficult to understand why. But for whatever reason, it seems impossible to replicate it. Setting aside the question of the many sci-fi action-adventure comedies that clearly […]
A franchise whose heights are as low as the Witchcraft series tends to force a pretty severe recalibration of one’s scale for “good” and “bad”, so it speaks to nothing at all that is objectively true for me to call Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood a pretty substantial jump up in quality. Or at least […]
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 […]
