1987’s Predator is an ideally stripped-down version of itself: a 1980s movie about a bunch of muscled meatheads typical of that decade’s action pictures encountering the one thing in this world (or rather, out of it) that’s tough enough to tear through them like wet toilet paper. It reduces both the ethos of Hollywood action […]

The Nice Guys feels more like a movie directed by the writer of Lethal Weapon than it feels like a movie directed by the director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Who in both cases is Shane Black, here making just about the Shane Blackest movie of his career. And there anyway comes a point where […]

Nihilistic violence, caustic misogyny, soullessly ironic humor: The Last Boy Scout should feel indistinguishable from all the other early-’90s action movies on the same post-Die Hard model, yet it is vastly more fascinating than any of them. Not, to be sure, for reasons that are entirely to its credit. At its worst, the film is […]

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: Iron Man 3 is all sorts of things to all sorts of people, but one of the things I […]

Iron Man, I think, is never going to be bettered, even if one day one of its sequels or spin-offs ends up being genuinely better cinema, because Iron Man had a bit of good fortune that none of them ever will: it was unexpected, and you only get to have that happen once. Just like […]