Space. A previously unknown life form that is both beautiful and completely unknowable. Man’s double-edged quest to understand and dominate over all existence. Life really, really should have worked, and the extent to which it fails makes it the biggest waste of potential so far of 2017, if not the single worst film overall. Life […]
The idea of a live-action remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is no better or worse than any of the mouse’s many examples of mining its own vault for new material, yet from the moment it was announced, it was met with over-excitement and unnecessary scorn. The cast, the songs, the very concept were […]
If you thought the only thing missing from Apocalypse Now was literal monsters, not just metaphorical ones, Kong: Skull Island is the movie you’ve been waiting for. To everyone else, it’s a flick with neat effects and lots of great creature design, spectacular visuals and a bevy of utterly forgettable, interchangeable characters who die with […]
Table 19 tells the story of an unlikely group of wedding attendants stuck together at the worst table, who were invited either perfunctorily or spitefully. Unfortunately it’s an accurate metaphor for the movie itself, which crams an impossibly talented cast into the lamest film of the year that appears to exist for no other reason […]
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a perfect movie in its own right, a masterful effort in raising then subverting audience expectations while delivering a powerful message on a subject that has gone tragically unaddressed in film. It is also a revelation for Peele himself, half of the beloved comedy team Key & Peele, whose feature […]
Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall doesn’t really need to be “reviewed” in the traditional sense. It’s a dumb movie about monsters invading medieval China and the brazenly anachronistic army tasked with staving it off, like someone fell asleep during The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and attempted to recreate the Battle of Helm’s […]
How do you possibly improve on the grace, skill, class and economy of John Wick, the film that wrote the book on making impeccable filmmaking technique appear totally effortless? Strange as it may seem, the answer is do exactly the same, only better. John Wick: Chapter 2 contains all of the typical downfalls of modern […]
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is the culmination of every adjective used to describe the director’s work—poetic, intelligent, philosophical, gorgeous—but with a sense of grounding that makes its style and themes that much more effective. A Jarmusch film is most often an exploration of the artist’s own influences; while he never artificially inserts himself or reduces his […]
Watching Gold, you can’t help but feel that every member of this production arrived with a different sense of what the final product would be. Stephen Gaghan is directing a fact-based procedural, Robert Elswit is shooting a psychological comedy-drama and Matthew McConaughey came overprepared for a madcap crime farce. The result plays out like American […]
Patriots Day is a reductive, insulting, dishonest bit of emotional manipulation that bullies its audience into withholding criticisms out of fear that they will be taken as insults against the heroic people of Boston who came together in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. No, director Peter Berg and co-producer/star Mark Wahlberg do […]