Something hit me like a bolt from the blue during the third act of Free Fire: I am all the way over nihilistic action movies. I don’t want to watch movies full of people who don’t care about anything commit violence against each other anymore. In my teens and twenties this felt ok; that it…
I don’t believe in objective reviews of media. I think the personal subjectivity of the reviewer is impossible to remove and, honestly, that it would be boring if you could. That said, I am not capable of being remotely objective when it comes to the Fast & Furious franchise. I find the formula they have…
I feel like I never see movies like Gifted anymore. Gifted is a smaller movie, almost completely devoid of the spectacle that snobs complain about in modern cinema. It’s as anonymous a movie as one can get from the director of The Amazing Spider-Man franchise, the star of Captain America and Octavia Spencer. It’s funny…
I’m sort of curious why Dreamworks even wanted to pay for the rights to make a Ghost in the Shell movie if they weren’t particularly interested in doing anything with the property they acquired. They seemed interested in making a cyberpunk movie, a cyberpunk movie about a badass lady android with some identity issues. I’m…
Life is a fine movie. It’s reasonably well-acted, the creature effects are stunning, and the script has enough twists and turns to keep the audience on its toes. Unfortunately, Life is a monster movie set in a confined area in outer space— and while that’s a remarkably specific genre, it contains some titanic movies. Life…
I saw two different kinds of ads for The Belko Experiment before it came out. There were ads that were pitching it as a more or less straight up horror movie, and then there were ads that were selling it as a kind of comedy-horror hybrid. It used a quote from an early review saying…
It’s probably a good thing that I’m not in charge of which movies get made and which ones don’t. While we would certainly get fewer third-rate horror movies and lazy animated movies (and like three more Crank movies, what happened to that franchise?) there’s just so many movies that must sound terrible at the log…
It’s kind of funny that the inferiority complex that has plagued comic books for decades has migrated on to comic book movies. Every time you read an article with the headline “Bam! Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore” you get this kind of desperate need for some of the less secure in the industry…
I am going to spend a lot of time telling you how scary Get Out is, but also how fresh it is.
I wonder if there’s a pop culture franchise I wouldn’t be excited to see turned in to a Lego production at this point. The Lego Batman Movie could have so easily been an uninspired cash-in to take advantage of how profitable Batman is as a character and the good will we all still feel from…
Most of the time when a studio looks to revive or remake an old property it’s a desperate grasp for more money, but I’m willing to give the people behind Rings a little more credit than that. The Ring is about a shared video, and the ways in which we share and consume videos has…
Split is over a week old and that’s usually enough to disqualify a movie from coverage here. (This is the policy that keeps me from reviewing Blade 2 every six months in a vain attempt to force it in to the conversation for best superhero movie of all time.) But Split had a secret, and…
