When a once profitable film franchise begins to fade, the studios that have reaped the benefits of same are left with little choice about how to handle it. With so much money at stake, both in ticket sales and ancillary merchandise on the line, they can’t just let it slip away with dignity. No, they… Read More »
THE DEAD DON’T DIE
THE DEAD DON’T DIE takes the tropes, idioms, and beloved foibles of low-budget zombie flicks and, with a skillful flick of its auteur’s cinematic wrist, recontextualizes them into a stylized gloss on the new normal of 2019. Certainly the “Make America White Again” ball cap sported by the most reviled citizen (Steve Buscemi) of sleepy… Read More »
DARK PHOENIX
Is this really how it all ends? A ragged bit of doggerel to finish out the cinematic X-Men saga? Or at least this incarnation of same. What started as a trenchant study of human nature at its best and worst, as well as a scathingly good time at the movies has, with DARK PHOENIX, devolved… Read More »
GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS
For most of GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS, the eponymous monsters pretty much go about their business without taking any notice of the small, scuttling humans that flee in their wake. For their part, the humans, when they are not scuttling, are providing the exposition between bouts of special effects eruptions. Hence, if you don’t… Read More »
BRIGHTBURN
What we have here is a dynamite premise fumbled in the execution. BRIGHTBURN gives us a strange visitor from another planet crashing to Earth as a baby and taken in by a good-hearted, infertile farm couple (Elizabeth Banks, David Denman) in the midst of baby fever. As with that other story of an infant from… Read More »
ALADDIN
The live-action version of ALADDIN does many things, including blurring the line between animation and live-action, not unlike the once and future AVATAR. It is more animation than live action and perhaps at some point there should be specific designation for cinematic efforts of this kind. But I digress. Most of what makes the film… Read More »
JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 — PARABELLUM
There is no doubt that part of the appeal of an action film is the chance to see things out of the ordinary. Like things being blown up real good, or brawls that shatter the laws of physics. And so it is with JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 – PARABELLUM, based on the graphic novel series. … Read More »
RED JOAN
Science is pure. A hypothesis is either true or it isn’t and the scientific method can be used, unfailingly, to prove it. Politics and human emotions are another story, as we learn in RED JOAN, a drama of that most potent mixture, love and politics. Based on a true story, it considers questions of loyalty… Read More »
AVENGERS: ENDGAME
The stakes have been raised so many times with event flicks that, when approaching one, hope is always tempered with experience about what to expect, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson. With AVENGERS: ENDGAME, though, hope wins out. The spectacle is everything it should be, and the story, of necessity a meandering thing, is nonetheless sustained by… Read More »
HELLBOY
There are many ways for a film to go wrong, and while HELLBOY may not have explored all of them, it has certainly come very close. Dialogue that is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, editing that teeters between pedestrian and laughable, and a story that is merely an excuse for carnage… Read More »