It’s dark. It’s gritty. It’s three hours long. Surprisingly, “The Batman” is also very good. Unlike other attempts DC has made to grittyfiy its already fairly gritty universe, “The Batman”‘s Gotham feels like a genuinely dangerous place, an unhinged crime-a-palooza where the only thing more inevitable than the nightly mugging you’ll get on the subway is […]
OK so “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”. The cliché, familiar to anyone who has ever been bored enough to attempt Risk, is “don’t ever start a land war in China”. The cliché says nothing about box office wars, which is just as well, because Disney and the MCU have just opened fire […]
There are two remembrances you ought to see in theaters right now. One is about a world-travelling outlaw with a shadowy past and a penchant for knives. The other is about Natasha Romanov. Released five years after his death, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” tries to puzzle together a satisfying explanation for Bourdain’s self-erasure […]
OK so “Godzilla vs. Kong”. Once upon a time in 1970, a young hippie couple made an ambitious list. It was called the “When We Get Rich List”, and the first item—a pair of winter boots—should tell you how extraordinarily and flagrantly broke my parents truly were at that point in their lives. Nevertheless, they […]
WW84 poses an interesting dilemma: what to say about a movie with a perfectly serviceable script, excellent performances, a charming and talented cast and a few truly brilliant scenes, that nonetheless leaves you completely cold? It’s a puzzle, a well-built house that nonetheless makes for an awkward home. Any single decision made in construction of […]
“Knives Out” is a bit like a pyramid scheme: immediately after you enter it, you will begin making a list of friends, family members, and casual acquaintances whom you might be able to cajole, bribe, or threaten into joining you in it. If you have no friends, you may be tempted to start waylaying people […]
OK so “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”. There is a movie hovering over the shoulder of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”, helpfully offering advice, like a Force Ghost. It’s the Movie That Could Have Been, the movie that would have been made had Carrie Fisher not died, on a flight to LAX, in […]
OK so time for a late movie review, courtesy of Jen Ockelmann-Wagner and her Disney+ subscription! (Thanks, Jen!) I’ve finally sat down and watched “Free Solo”, the documentary which follows the mountain climber Alex Honnold from early 2016 through his successful attempt to free solo El Capitan in 2017. Shot by a team of mountain-climbing […]
OK so time for a retro movie review! Today, at Sean Gorman’s request, I’m reviewing “Cutthroat Island”, the 1995 flop which broke loss records ($82 million dollars blown) and nearly sunk director Renny Harlin’s career (he was saved, the next year, by “The Long Kiss Goodnight”). Gorman is a big, and unironic, fan of “Cutthroat […]
This trailer got me so hyped that I’m genuinely having trouble calming down enough to analyze it shot-by-shot. So I’m not gonna try. Instead, here are some things that leapt out about it to me, and feel free to chime in with the things that caught your eye. 1.) THAT OCEAN. I think that the […]
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