After all the secrets lurking within 10 Cloverfield Lane have been revealed, after all its mysteries have come unraveled and you’re leaving the theater, that’s when the pure weirdness of what you have just witnessed hits you. This is a movie with two entirely different plots that run parallel but never fully intersect; first, there’s […]
Disney can be accused of many things—cultural appropriation, setting unreal expectations for children, censoring the brutality of old folk tales for mass audiences and thereby dulling their messages—but one thing Disney has mastered in recent years is maximizing the potential of its acquisitions. If you’re a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you have Disney’s […]
At the advance screening for Alex Proyas’ megabudgeted misfire Gods of Egypt, someone in the row in front of me turned on his phone in plain sight of those behind him and started texting. Under normal circumstances, I’d be more than happy to yell at a complete stranger over this sort of thing, but when […]
“A New-England Folktale” reads the subtitle for the much-hyped (all of it earned) The Witch, the feature film debut from writer-director Robert Eggers. One would be forgiven for interpreting this as a mark of revisionist horror, but there is nothing revisionist about Eggers’ film. In fact, there’s much that is revolutionary. The Witch follows a tight-knit […]
In the culmination of a tease that began with Ryan Reynolds’ pointless and tonally inconsistent cameo in 2009’s disastrous X-Men Origins: Wolverine comes the psychotic, violent, traumatized, fourth-wall-breaking and utterly hilarious Deadpool. Hilarious, that is, if you have more than a passing familiarity with the tropes of comic book films. The jokes in Deadpool tend […]
Hollywood farce Hail, Caesar! is a masterstroke of screwball absurdism from the Coen brothers, as they return with the subgenre of technically impeccable yet thematically anarchic comedy they practically invented. Harkening back to their output in the 1990s, Hail, Caesar! is a satirical genre parody and period piece in the vein of The Hudsucker Proxy […]
On February 18, 1952, the SS Pendleton was nearing its destination of Boston when a massive storm quite literally ripped the T2 tanker in half, killing all eight of the crew members in the sunken bow section while sending 33 survivors adrift in the still-afloat stern. As the men banded together to stay alive, a […]
True to classic Charlie Kaufman form, everything about the writer/co-director’s latest film, Anomalisa, is wholly unconventional from conception to execution, yet is entirely accessible to anyone who’s felt hopelessly disconnected from other people. It’s a film full of contradictions; it’s a stop-motion animated film with a hard-R rating about isolation and identity, but it’s funny. […]
When news first broke that Michael Bay would be making the inevitable Benghazi movie, the (non-tinfoil-hat-wearing) world was of two minds. The most prominent reaction was groaning at two of today’s most tiresome utterances: Michael Bay and Benghazi. Those two references in the same sentence was reason enough to dismiss 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers […]
When does admiration become infatuation? When does infatuation become love? Are there clear, definable lines between any of the three? What is a good, respectable person to do with feelings that come entirely naturally, yet are overlooked, misunderstood and maligned by the world around us? These are the questions that are never fully stated yet […]