There is dumb, and then there is Roland Emmerich dumb. To wit: -Dumb: “William Shakespeare’s” plays were written by a nobleman, possibly Edward De Vere. Roland Emmerich Dumb: Also King James I was a gay dwarf. -Dumb: The Mayans predicted the end of the world in the year 2012. Roland Emmerich Dumb: This will happen […]
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 […]
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 […]
Author’s note, March 2024: I’m leaving my original rating intact, but in retrospect, I was hedging against the fear that Dune: Part Two, if and when it was made, would let this film down. As such a thing did not end up happening, consider this to be a 4-star review in all but name. When […]
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 […]
Prior to seeing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a mainstream popcorn blockbuster-type comic book movie from a production company that has gotten quite a lot of mileage out of casting wonderful actors in roles that are much too small for them, I’ve been a bit snarky in talking about it like the […]
The Suicide Squad is one of the most pleasantly “that was exactly the movie I assumed it would be” movies in ages. That is to say: it has always been very clear that it would be better than 2016’s Suicide Squad, to which it is a very vaguely-related sequel. It has also always been very […]
If there is one thing that I was not prepared for with Disney’s much-delayed Jungle Cruise, an action-adventure based on the Disneyland theme park ride that has been ready to go since late 2019, it’s that I would negatively compare it to the 1972 Werner Herzog film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Which is not […]
Black Widow is, on balance, a largely blank experience: devoid of anything particularly obnoxious other than a 133-minute running time that it seems to view as an obligation rather than an opportunity for expansive storytelling, pretty formulaic in every single element of its storytelling, packed with hollow action scenes that don’t hurt to watch, nor […]
“Why didn’t you make this other movie I would have liked better, instead of the movie you did make?” is one of the shabbiest angles a film critic can ever play, and I do not deny that in my time I have played it, to my shame. But it’s rare to find a film that […]
Everything that is worst about F9 – or to give its mildly bizarre, never-seen-onscreen full title, F9: The Fast Saga – is exactly the same as everything that makes it such a wonderfully ludicrous, over-the-top joy to behold. As the first honest-to-God watch-it-on-the-biggest screen possible Hollywood popcorn blockbuster in over a year, since the repulsive […]
As the climax to Legendary Pictures’ “MonsterVerse” franchise, Godzilla vs Kong raises the question: was anybody in the entire world waiting for the climax to the MonsterVerse? How many people other than the rabid consumers of media news blogs, their brains addled by too much internet, know that the “MonsterVerse”, under that name, even exists? […]
