I cannot think of many questions less burning than “what if Santa Claus was a resentful, embittered survivalist who had been almost completely ruined by the weak economy of the 2010s, and the only thing that reignited his desire to live at all was being hunted by an extraordinarily proficient assassin; and also Mel Gibson […]
The for Gerard Butler vehicles is about as low as low gets, so if I first say that Greenland is, like, obviously the best Gerard Butler movie I’ve ever seen, I have given you very little information. It could still be a bad movie, and indeed, if we were to talk strictly in terms of […]
So, Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite! You’ve just got to love the stubborn optimism of that exclamation point, by the way. Like we’ll be convinced that it’s a bubbly, fun bit of high-energy nonsense if our brain reflexively rises up in volume as we read it Also, I cannot shake the feeling that it […]
The Old Guard is the the most perfectly Netflix-ey film you could hope for out of Netflix’s attempt to kick-start a superhero franchise. It is, for starters, deeply unpleasant to look at, filmed through a muddy digital veil that pushes all of the colors hard towards grey, unless the entire purpose of the scene is […]
I don’t usually like to play this game, but if Unhinged isn’t the perfect film to embody the 2020 movie year, I don’t know what. First, there’s what it “is”: a script, by Carl Ellsworth (who was knocking out mediocre thrillers at a nice clip in the late 2000s, and then suddenly went completely dark […]
Breathing Down Your Neck As you may know if you followed along with Tim’s Australian Winter of Blood, horror from Down Under is something to be reckoned with. When you’re making a film with the intent to scare people who live every minute of their daily lives at risk of being horribly maimed or poisoned, […]
There’s a moment that typifies everything about Extraction so perfectly that I’m almost ashamed to mention it. In the film, a burly action throwback to the early ’90s or late ’80s, spiced up with contemporary digital post-production wizardry, the hero is an Australian mercenary named Tyler Rake. At one point in an early action scenes, […]
If, as is so often said, Tom Hanks is America’s Dad, it makes perfect sense that he would, at some point, have to be involved in an American Dad Movie. And, of course, he already has, but in the case of Greyhound, his role was far more active than in such dad movies par excellence […]
I have one thing about Disney’s new live-action Mulan that makes me extremely happy: it’s not a mindless shot-for-shot remake of the 1998 animated film, and in this respect is considerably less irksome than the 2017 Beauty and the Beast and the 2019 Aladdin and The Lion King, the other remakes of films from the […]
Forgive me if start talking about Tenet, the eleventh feature directed by Christopher Nolan (and, I am tempted to say, the most Nolan-ish of them all), by simply quoting what I had to say ten years ago about Inception, the seventh Nolan feature: “What some critics have praise/assailed as ‘confusing’ in [Tenet] is really just […]
So help me, I really do feel sorry for The New Mutants and the poor saps who made it. If all had gone according to plan, it would have slunk into theaters in April 2018, gotten bored reviews comparing it unfavorably to Logan as an example of trying to do a different genre than action-thriller […]
There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that the Walt Disney Company was so mortified at the thought of releasing Artemis Fowl to theaters that it engineered SARS-CoV-2 and triggered a global pandemic solely to have a reasonable excuse to dump the film to the Disney+ streaming service. But one cannot help but wonder. The […]
