One of the very first lines of dialogue spoken in the 1989 animated feature The Little Mermaid is “A fine strong wind and a following sea. King Triton must be in a friendly-type mood.” The approximately equivalent line of dialogue in the 2023 remake of that same film is “This is a dangerous time. Tonight’s […]
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 […]
To wrap up the summer movie season, 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 a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 12: Mack & Rita explores the comedic potentials of what happens when a woman […]
If you had asked me at the start of 2022 if I thought that 2009’s Orphan had lived on as a classic of modern horror, I’d have looked sort of through you for an awkward moment in a confused, glassy-eyed way before tentatively replying “the J.A. Bayona film?” And we’d have had a beat before […]
George Miller’s directorial career, which only now arrives at Feature Film #10, 43 years after his debut, consists basically of only weird movies and very weird movies, which should make me pause before saying that Three Thousand Years of Longing is the weirdest, and yet here we are. This is, effectively, his “one for me” […]
It would be accurate to describe Beast as “the movie where Idris Elba kicks a CGI lion in the face”. But it would be even more accurate to describe Beast as “the movie where Idris Elba kicks a CGI lion in the face twice“, which of course means it is twice as good. And as […]
Not Okay, the Hulu-based sophomore effort from actress-writer-director Quinn Shephard, opens with a much-discussed “content warning” that the film we are about to experience contains “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.” It’s a tweak of the viewer’s nose intended to set a cheeky tone and make some kind of statement about […]
I think the fair thing to do is to regard Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank not with contempt that it exists, but with amazement that it survived to be released. Though I think you could temper that amazement with a little bit of contempt. That would be fair. Still, let’s not get too […]
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 […]
The 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was a massive bestseller, whose 15 million copies sold make it by far one of the biggest literary successes of the 2010s and among the 100-odd bestselling novels of the last hundred years.* It’s also a book I hadn’t heard of prior to the spring […]
I would claim, and I would certainly appear to be in a very small minority in doing so, that with Nope, Jordan Peele has officially entered the realm of wildly talented directors whose work is all but guaranteed to be interesting and visually striking on a rare and potent level, but who are also fucking […]
