Personal life and religious beliefs aside, it’s OK to love Tom Cruise for his increasingly cartoonish career, performing stunts that have gotten so extreme you have to wonder how he came about this motivation to defy death for a movie. Does his alarm clock tell him “You will die today” just so he has a […]
Southpaw director Antoine Fuqua unfortunately shares a fatal flaw with the film’s lead character, light heavyweight champion Billy Hope: despite an indomitable work ethic and mountains of sincerity, all his best efforts fall apart when he doesn’t have a plan. Fuqua is capable of being a master craftsman, capable of making potentially forgettable crime yarns […]
You have two options this summer: You can take Hollywood’s nostalgia bait and buy a ticket to one of its myriad sequels, prequels, reboots and spiritual successors to your favorite movies. Or you can call their bluff and just enjoy classic films on your own time, free from all the retconning and desperate self-parody. Here […]
Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes is a perfectly serviceable adaptation of a latter-day Sherlock novel not written by Arthur Conan Doyle, starring a character whose episodic escapades are better suited for television. It’s a beautifully shot story that remains confined to about three locations. It’s an engaging mystery told through flashbacks that only remains unsolved because […]
Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike was one of the most pleasant surprises of 2012, with a muscle-centric marketing campaign that no doubt sold tickets but failed to notify audiences that this film was actually the work of a master director at the top of his game. Stylistically impressive, tonally sophisticated beyond its straightforward narrative with a […]
If Ted 2 proves anything, it’s that Seth MacFarlane cannot be trusted with his own success. MacFarlane—a demonstrably talented, funny and often thoughtful individual—has a nasty habit of doing something fun and original that connects with critics and audiences, only to capitalize on his success with vanity projects that rely more on smugness and self-satisfaction […]
After several years of leaning heavily on sequels and good-but-not-great properties, the Pixar we all know and love is back with Inside Out to reclaim its title as a beacon of emotional honesty in the spastic, cynical world of family entertainment. Its long history of tugging at audience’s heartstrings by making us empathize with unlikely […]
Peppered throughout Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World are self-aware, and self-defeating, references to the original 1993 film and what one can only imagine as the sequels to come; from a techie in a vintage Jurassic Park t-shirt to a military grunt who imagines a world in which trained velociraptors are weaponized and sent into combat […]
It may have taken four years of failed vehicles and forced cameos, but Melissa McCarthy finally hits her stride in Spy. Packaged and marketed as more of the same from McCarthy—an alternately crass and sincere broad comedy that misunderstands the difference between empathy and mockery—the slyly progressive and engaging Spy may end up being the […]
If your favorite part of Independence Day is when the dog jumps to safety, San Andreas is your movie. Thematically and tonally inconsistent, it has one goal and one goal only: to make you cheer. Never mind the deaths of millions upon millions of human beings as the backdrop in a story that leads to […]