Why lob blood and guts when a lamp being knocked over can make you jump out of your seat?
AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR
For sheer value-for-money, you can’t top AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. It’s pure entertainment with an endless parade of the kind of whiz-bang special effects, not quite sloppy sentiment, and a constant barrage of the quips and banter that define grace under pressure in the Marvel Universe. Plus, pretty much everyone from the MCU finds his or… Read More »
I FEEL PRETTY
Amy Schumer. What the hell happened? Blazing into theaters with TRAINWRECK, a film that gleefully subverted rom-coms with extreme prejudice, she is now flailing through I FEEL PRETTY, her second disaster in a row. That both of them (the other was SNATCHED) were the very genre she set on fire is an irony that, perhaps,… Read More »
BEIRUT
BEIRUT opens before the Lebanese Civil War with U.S. diplomat Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm), on the last good day of his life, using a brilliant analogy to explain the political situation in Lebanon to his party guests in that eponymous city. Even the way the guests have arranged themselves, as Skiles put it: Christians on… Read More »
READY PLAYER ONE
With Steven Spielberg, sometimes, most of the time, you get E.T: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL. Sometimes, though, you get 1941. It’s not that READY PLAYER ONE rivals the sheer ineptitude of the latter, but it is definitely skirting the shoals. With Spielberg, one has come to expect much, and so when presented with a flick that is… Read More »
UNSANE
For me, the single most disconcerting image in a Steven Soderbergh film is from CONTAGION. It’s not a panorama of people dying from the pandemic that threatens to end civilization as we know it, instead it’s the silent, dispassionately clinical shot of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head being autopsied. There are people I know who reference the… Read More »
NOSTALGIA
Click here for the flashback interview with Mark Pellington for THE LAST WORD. Polynesians have a word for the power with which we imbue inanimate objects. Manu. There are supernatural overtones to the word’s meaning in its original sense, but the power that objects have for the characters in Mark Pellington’s NOSTALGIA, if not strictly… Read More »
THE PARTY
It begins with Kristen Scott-Thomas, in stark black-and-white, answering her door, hair askew, elegance frayed, eyes wild. She points a handgun right at the camera.
BLACK PANTHER
BLACK PANTHER is the standard by which all other superhero movies this year will be measured. Maybe this decade. Showcasing the expected show-stopping special effects, a rich mythology from the Marvel comic on which it is based, and plenty of rousing action that is both imaginative (weaponized rhinoceroses) and genuinely suspenseful, it gets the most… Read More »
EARLY MAN
Click here for the KMR interview with director/co-writer Nick Park. The filmmakers at Aardman have carved out for their studio a specific niche among animated films. Theirs is a humor that is sly, unafraid of a pun, and equally fearless in its embrace of the silly for the sake of silliness. It is a universe… Read More »