Furious 7, the last altogether good movie in the Fast & Furious series, came out in April 2015. This is very recent according to any human-scale accounting of time; but it has been an entire generation in American action cinema. The intervening four years have borne witness to a veritable golden age: while Furious 7 […]

“The blood of Christ.” “Holy shit!” “The holiest.” -An actual exchange of dialogue written by an actual professional screenwriter for an actual movie Rigorous honesty compels me to admit that the new horror picture The Nun is not actively good, and may in fact even be bad. At least, it has terrible dialogue and hugely […]

Ocean’s Eight finds itself in the heinously awkward position of being a rather middling Ocean’s _____ movie, but a very good generic heist movie, thanks mostly to the things it takes from the franchise in terms of style and structure. So most of its strengths are exactly those things that, by calling attention to themselves, are […]

The Lego Batman Movie is not at all perfect, and in some particular respects its not-perfection strongly suggests that the returns on theatrical Lego movies are going to start diminishing pretty damn quickly (coming in less than eight months: The Lego Ninjago Movie). But it’s got this going for it: for the first time since […]

We have, in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a first for the Harry Potter Cinematic Universe: a film with a running time of about two-and-a-quarter hours, telling a story that was designed to take about two-and-a-quarter hours to tell. This was a problem for just about every one of the eight Potter films […]

A review requested by Mark K, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Let us be very clear about one thing: The Blues Brothers is, by any objective standard, a messy wreck. This is true of the 1980 theatrical cut, and it’s even more true of the extended cut […]