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 […]
Every mainstream movie is commercial product, of course, and plenty of the less-mainstream ones as well. But it’s been a good long bit since I’ve been left as incapable of ignoring that fact as I am with PAW Patrol: The Movie, a throwback to a simpler time in children’s animation when cartoons were not merely […]
There’s simply no disentangling the things that are good about Reminiscence from the things that are bad. The film is the feature debut of writer-director Lisa Joy, who co-created the television series Westworld with her husband, Jonathan Nolan, and it is very much something that feels like it came from the mind of Christopher Nolan’s […]
Free Guy is a film that lives and dies on one consideration: how much do you like Ryan Reynolds’s “thing”? I have grown to dislike it very much. But by all available evidence the movie has turned out to be one of 2021’s most successful crowdpleasers, as one of the few releases in the post- […]
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 […]
It’s missing the point, I know, but the question I feel compelled to start with is: did we need a revisionist version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? The 14th Century Middle English poem is a timeless favorite of medieval literature buffs, but how many of us can there possibly be? Certainly not enough […]
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 […]
In deference to the very vocal minority of internet cinephile types who have decided to use the new film Old to declare that M. Night Shyamalan has Actually Always Been Good, I will say this: the directing certain is not lazy. Shyamalan has quite a remarkable number of tricks laid out to make what’s very […]
We’ve got to start somewhere, so why not with the question that I’ve been kicking around in my head since I finished Space Jam: A New Legacy: how can anyone worship a God vindictive and hateful enough to allow this movie to exist? No wait, that’s the other question I’ve been kicking around. The one […]
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 […]
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 […]
This does not strike me as an unreasonable set of expectations: give me a movie musical with lots of wide shots to show off the dancing, long takes to serve the same end, tuneful songs to drive the dancing forward, and good color saturation to make it all pop off the screen, and I’m happy. […]
