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 using the ingredients of a superhero movie, the usual fans of the X-Men franchise would […]
With Memorial Day upon us, and weeks to go before new movies are scheduled to hit theaters (God willing), we wanted to continue our look at summer movie seasons past with this reflection by Conrado. For more summer movie retrospectives, check out our podcast on the best summer movies of all time! -Tim With movie theaters closed and all major studio movies delayed indefinitely, the 2020 summer movie season is […]
It’s easy – very, very easy, I’d say – to look at the current state of comic book movies and feel nothing but cold dislike for the machine-pressed non-art that the genre has largely turned into, as we enter the third decade of the post-X-Men superhero boom. But, while I have no desire to apologise for the ponderous mediocrity of the superhero genre as it is presently constituted, it’s worth […]
Thankfully, you can’t tell from the onscreen evidence, but Bloodshot was conceived as the first film in a Valiant Comics shared cinematic universe. Ah, Valiant Comics! Just the name brings me back to the ’90s, when Bloodshot was introduced the world, and the idea of a nanite-infused supersoldier seemed like a cool sci-fi concept and not a humiliatingly stale sci-fi cliché. The film, perhaps to its credit, resolutely follows suit: […]
Gavin Hood is an extremely inconsistent director (and calling the man who signed his name to X-Men Origins: Wolverine “inconsistent” is paying him a very nice big compliment, I think), but his last feature is one that left me inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Eye in the Sky, from 2015, is one of the decade’s most airtight thrillers, somehow managing to fill 102 minutes with sweaty […]
The “what went wrong?” behind the scenes exposés of Dark Phoenix, tenth and final film in the X-Men series, appeared with absolutely shocking speed after the film’s franchise-worst opening weekend. In these testimonials, we find the nugget of information that the film exists in its current form largely because, after the drowsy critical and audience reception to 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, the studio’s biggest and only note was “do not-that, next […]
From where I stand, the summer movie season of 2019 has just tipped off of a cliff. Godzilla: King of the Monsters was the last popcorn movie I was looking forward to for over two months – and look at how well that turned out for me – and while June isn’t quite the wasteland that July is shaping up to be, it’s been a good long while since the […]
If you’ve seen Stranger Things or the recently released zeitgeist-embracing adventure The Kid Who Would Be King, you know there’s no shortage of nostalgia for the decades in which most of the folks reading this grew up. The 1980s and ’90s are en vogue and ready to transport you back to your Topanga poster-covered walls of your bedroom. Or whomever you were into at the time. Maybe it was just […]
The general tenor of reviews of Glass suggest that, after a two-film renaissance consisting of 2015’s The Visit and 2017’s Split, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is up to his bad old tricks again. But I don’t know, I think that this actually is a return to form: sharp-looking movies with with an elegantly classical visual sensibility that falters against clumsy dialogue that overarticulates themes, meandering pacing, dopey climaxes, and a […]
The title of Life Itself comes from one of its most particularly florid, sophomoric lines, “The most unreliable narrator is life itself.” This sentence, or a close variation, is spoken enough times during the length of the film that, if you were to take a shot every single time, you would likely die. Given that you would therefore be spared watching the entirety of Life Itself, this might very well […]
You know how certain actors become synonymous with certain decades? How when you think of the fifties you might think of James Dean’s red leather jacket? Or when you think of the seventies and an image of John Travolta dancing at the disco flashes through your mind? Lately I’ve been wondering what made us link these actors to their respective decades. Sometimes it’s a matter of box office success, like […]
So we come to the end of one of the more satisfying summer movie seasons of the 2010s. Augusts are always special to me; they get all the weird little misfits that feel almost like popcorn movies, but with something horribly wrong about them. This particular August also includes the film that has, very weirdly, become the biggest “yes I want to see that” title among my real-world friends, which […]
