I get it. After eight installments of souped-up cars zooming (in the old sense) across the screen, the stakes are very high in F9: THE FAST SAGA, a franchise that is dedicated to finding new ways to crash, crumple, and otherwise decimate automobiles. And so including a Pontiac Fiero tooling around in space should not… Read More »
THE ADDAMS FAMILY
Considering it only lasted two seasons in its initial run back in the 1960s, the television version of Charles Addam’s gruesomely enchanting New Yorker cartoon, The Addams Family, has become a powerful pop culture touchstone. It’s a favor that the current animated version amply repays, rife as it is with pop and political references. And… Read More »
KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS
KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS continues Laika’s string of arresting, unconventional stop-motion animated films that are both sophisticated and enchanting. Like PARANORMAN and CORALINE, KUBO is audacious enough to tackle serious subjects and to do so with no pretense about the finality of death, or the reality of evil. Taking its cue from Joseph Campbell’s… Read More »
Dreary DARK PLACES
DARK PLACES is awash with dark moodiness as it tells a raggedy story that suffers from a failure of to find a narrative structure as strong or as compelling as the performance of his star, Charlize Theron. Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, on whose novel of the same name GONE GIRL was based,… Read More »
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
George Miller first sent Mad Max blazing across the sere post-apocalyptic landscape in 1979 and thence onto cinematic legend. Sequels followed. Mel Gibson in the eponymous role rose to international fame and, eventually, Miller moved on to different sorts of classics with BABE and HAPPY FEET. Now, thirty years and more later, he is revisiting… Read More »
HANCOCK
John Hancock (Will Smith) is not your typical superhero, and HANCOCK is not your typical superhero film. It is as daring and audacious as its eponymous hero, venturing into realms of mythos and sentiment with equal dexterity and erudition. It’s one of the funniest flicks out this summer. It’s one of the most romantic. It’s… Read More »
SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNSTMAN
It was certainly an intriguing enough idea, even a bold one, turning the Evil Queen in SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN in the tragic hero of the piece. It smacks of Miltons re-interpretation of Lucifer in Paradise Lost. Alas, a smack is as far as it goes here. Director Rupert Sanders is no Milton, and… Read More »
A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST
The late, lamented biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who popularized science for the masses and made the opabinia the favorite fossil, after the trilobite, for some of us, was a proponent of the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution. Rather than a steady-state and gradual process, evolution was a thing of fits and starts, pushed by a… Read More »
MONSTER
Patty Jenkins’ film, MONSTER, is brilliant, breathtaking, and completely unforgettable. Those are words that are sorely overused in the land of crit-speak, and yet there are few films that are so very deserving of them. Jenkins biographical story of Aileen Wournos, convicted serial killer, has all the earmarks of a tabloid tale from one of… Read More »
NORTH COUNTRY
I don’t know that NORTH COUNTRY can even be said to have its heart in the right place. I’m not even sure that it has a heart. In recounting the events leading up to a sexual harassment class-action suit brought by a suitably plucky female miner in Minnesota, it cheapens the story “inspired” by actual… Read More »