I don’t know if TOP GUN:MAVERICK holds the record for the time elapsed between the original and the sequel, but if waiting over three decades results in a film as terrific as this, I hope filmmakers everywhere will at least consider taking their own sweet time when making sequels. This is an adrenalin-junkie’s fantasy, tightly… Read More »
TRANSFORMERS — REVENGE OF THE FALLEN
One day, MichaelBay will fulfill his destiny and perhaps his fondest wish and make a film that is nothing but big explosions. With TRANFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, he has come very close. This benighted cacophony is a painful blend of overproduced action and shameless exposition. The sense of fun found in the original is… Read More »
TRANSFORMERS — DARK OF THE MOON
The first giveaway that TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON will be a film with serious problems comes early on. In an attempt to inject President Kennedy into the film, a sub-par digital image is used. Kennedy has the unglossed appearance of a student cartoon, the eyes distinctly off, the face itself curiously ill-formed. As rotoscoping,… Read More »
TRANSFORMERS — AGE OF EXTINCTION
Perhaps Michael Bay was worried that this might be the last Transformers movie ever, hence the extinction in the title, and, further hence, being the reason that he packed the running time with even more than usual of his trademark pyrotechnics, hyperbolic action sequences, and the wanton destruction of a noodle shop. Then again, Mr,… Read More »
RING TWO
Sometimes a film offers up an emblematic moment, one that crystallizes what is at the heart of the action and in RING TWO, that moment can be summed up in two words. Angry deer. They appear after Rachel (Naomi Watts returning after what may be the result of a lost bar bet) and her continually… Read More »
SKELETON KEY
There is one perfect moment in SKELETON KEY, which is remarkable more for the fact that it’s the only good moment in the entire film than for its own innate effectiveness. In it, a character picks up a cigarette, lights it with the torpid evil inherent in supernatural films set in the swamps of Louisiana,… Read More »