Being the best Terminator film since Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 isn’t even a low bar to clear. It is a line painted on the ground. But I’m happy anyways that Terminator: Dark Fate is able to step across that line. It gets there largely by being the first time in four tries to figure out what should have been self-evident all along: these films don’t live and die […]

Carrie and Rob review Terminator: Dark Fate which ignores the last three Terminator movies and is a direct follow-up to The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, directed by James Cameron. This installment, directed by Tim Miller, brings back stars Linda Hamilton as the immortal Sarah Connor and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the now aged T-800. New to the franchise is Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes and Gabriel Luna.

“The best Terminator movie since Terminator 2: Judgment Day” is a statement like “Jai Courtney’s best-ever performance in a movie”: they both have the functional shape of a compliment, but they’re not actually saying very much that’s complimentary. And they’re both true of Terminator Genisys, the little movie that couldn’t, currently on pace to be one of 2015’s most visible and embarrassing box office flops. That’s not… entirely… fair. It […]

Every Sunday 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: it took 10 long years of nobody anywhere giving much of a shit one way or the other, but now Men in Black 3 exists. And to the surprise of most of us, it […]

The third sequel directed by James Cameron – but only the first sequel to a film he’d overseen originally – Terminator 2: Judgment Day holds a very special place in my heart; like a great many American males of my age, this was the first R-rated movie I ever saw, or at least the first that I ever saw in the full and certain knowledge that it was R-rated, and […]

Piranha II: The Spawning may have been a wretched, cheap monster picture, but it had one benefit for the young first-time director James Cameron: it put his name out there, and got him in a position that any young filmmaker would have committed some of the most wicked sins to achieve, namely, he found himself simultaneously writing two major Hollywood sequels, a far cry from the scrungy Italian industry where […]

When a young, cash-strapped filmmaker named James Cameron started writing a screenplay about a diner waitress being chased by a murderous cyborg from the future, he probably didn’t expect to be launching a durable tent-pole franchise that would last (so far) 25 years past that first movie’s debut. But when The Terminator became a massive hit for its relative tiny budget, a sequel became an inevitability. Still, Cameron had the […]

In the thirteen years since James Cameron’s last new feature, Avatar, I have increasingly come to treasure his particular mode of popcorn filmmaking, which I feel didn’t used to be rare, but basically has been dead as dead can be for all of those thirteen years. It is a mode of complete, unyielding sincerity, mixed with an absolute disinterest in seeming sophisticated, so that sincerity has a particularly blunt, surface-level […]

With many thanks to Patreon subscriber Jack C. we have been given a real doozy of a topic for this week: Top 5 Movies You Hate That Everyone Else Loves Seems pretty innocuous, right? WRONG. This topic is at the foundation of where all blood baths are formed. Tensions where high, but the episode remained *mostly* cordial, due to pure mental and emotional fatigue from our respective hosts. Whose list do you […]

Some films that are marketed with an emphasis on how much of a “passion project” they were for the people involved are obviously bullshitting us. This is not the case with Black Adam. That this film, the first big-screen adventure for the mid-tier DC Comics supervillain-cum-antihero, is a long-gestating passion project for star Dwayne Johnson is the unvarnished truth, and we know this because there have been stories floating around […]

The Bill & Ted series is made up of nothing but miracles. 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure obviously intended to be nothing but a disposable lark, mocking some cultural trends of the day on the way to being forgotten by the world at large; instead, based really on nothing I can point to except for its sheer goodwill and hugely pleasant performances, it was and remains a beloved cult […]

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 […]