6. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets If this was just about wasted potential, Valerian would easily be on the top of this list. There are five worse movies this year but none of them have a fraction of the visual artistry displayed here by Luc Besson. Valerian has some of the best…
I think The Last Jedi is my favorite Star Wars film. It’s hard to say, these movies need so much time and will be seen over and over again. I’m unwittingly comparing it in my head to my more recent viewings of the original trilogy and not the dazzling first ones but I have to…
There’s a degree to which I have to respect any film that can take a thoroughly innocuous thing and make it terrifying. Movies like Child’s Play or Nightmare on Elm Street have done this and become iconic classics partially on that basis. If you can make something spooky that people didn’t find spooky before like…
It would be overly cynical to say that I’m never surprised, or pleasantly surprised by movies anymore. It happens fairly often that a movie I think is going to be mediocre or bad ends up being good. It’s much more rare that a movie that I’m actively rolling my eyes at while the trailer is…
I often cite the original Blade Runner as my favorite movie. I also think having one favorite anything is kind of silly so it’s always been less of a true answer as it’s been an indication of what I like. I like cyberpunk, I like hard-boiled detective stories, I like being asked to think about…
Kingsman: The Secret Service was such a breath of fresh air when it came out. It was an action comedy that didn’t decide it could skip out on the action choreography part. Matthew Vaughn made a movie that was all the way both things. It was honestly a bit shocking to experience after so many…
I don’t really know what it’s like to be an actor and even less what it’s like to be an aging actor, but I have to wonder what made Michael Keaton take this role in American Assassin. He signed on to play this role after being nominated for an Oscar for Birdman and having wrapped…
The original It miniseries came out when I was in first grade. My parents, being reasonable people, didn’t let me watch it, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know it existed back then. But an elementary school has kids in it so much older than six and while I wouldn’t want my 10 or 11…
I have to imagine production of The Hitman’s Bodyguard started with director Patrick Hughes gathering the whole cast together and giving them some kind of speech along the lines of “Look, we all know this script is a piece of garbage but if we pull together we can elevate it way past tolerable” and then…
There’s a part of me that can’t help but admire the whole Conjuring franchise. They have their main series movies directed by James Wan and starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, huge stars for mid-budget horror movies, and then in the off-years they can make these spin-off movies like the Annabelle movies or the two…
I wonder if it bothers Stephen King that his 54 novels and 200 short stories have produced exactly one great movie. (Two if you count The Shining, and you probably shouldn’t, considering the very public feud between author and director.) We have the greatest pulp author of a generation, perhaps of all time, and he…
It’s hard coming here to review Atomic Blonde after ripping in to Valerian last week. I said Valerian was a gorgeous movie with well-executed action sequences that didn’t click for me because the script was a genuine chore to think about. Atomic Blonde has a lot of the same problems, and at times looks like…
