Click here for the flashback interview with Emerald Fennell for SALTBURN. When Emily Bronte published WUTHERING HEIGHTS in 1847, it was hailed for its strangeness, its intensity, and its disquieting disquisition on obsession. Emerald Fennell, she of A PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and SALTBURN, has taken Brontë’s novel and re-imagined it for modern audiences, recreating the… Read More »
THE MOMENT
THE MOMENT is wise enough to know that the standard for a satire about the music industry has already been set, and any attempts to impinge on SPINAL TAP’s brilliance is a fool’s errand at best. Hence, this deep dive into the Brat Summer of Charlie XCX goes in a different direction, not one that… Read More »
SHELTER
SHELTER is not your typical Jason Statham film. Sure, he’s a one-man demolition squad when it comes to giving the bad guys their comeuppance, but the character is not a caricature nor is he a cardboard cutout spewing quips and taglines. Rather this is a Statham with a quiet presence in stark contrast to the… Read More »
MERCY
It’s a classic film noir set-up with just a dash of Hitchcock. A Los Angeles man in the near future awakens from a drunken binge to find that he’s being accused of murder. And not just any murder. No, he’s stabbed his wife a couple of years into a rough patch in their marriage. To… Read More »
GREENLAND 2: MIGRATION
Back in 2020, with the pandemic in full swing and the end of life as we knew it creeping beyond the theoretical, GREENLAND gave us a way to focus our collective anxiety on a civilization ending comet name Clarke and one man’s struggle to save his family. On some level, though, we knew merely getting… Read More »
PRIMATE
Filmmaker Johannes Roberts absolutely understood the assignment with PRIMATE, a film about a pet chimpanzee turned killer. In any film with that premise, the one thing we all expect is to see is the chimp tearing someone’s face off, the which Ben, the chimp in question, does in the first 5 minutes. Once that trope… Read More »
28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE
28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE picks up where last year’s 28 YEARS LATER left off. It also picks up with some characters that were peripheral to the last installment, but who will prove central to this one. That last film introduced us to the dangers inherent in a post-pandemic population thrown back to the… Read More »
ANACONDA
Ever since TROPIC THUNDER, I have longed to see Jack Black once again running through a jungle in a state of hysteria. I love that film and I have similarly good feelings about his return to the jungle in ANACONDA. I have been using “Don’t judge me”, his plaintive cry during a fraught moment in… Read More »
AVATAR 3: FIRE AND ASH
I’ll say this for James Cameron, he knows how to push the envelope of what special effects can do. He gave us the Terminator series, and he sank the Titanic in a spectacular fashion that not only took the ship to the bottom of the ocean but also explained the structural failures that cascaded into… Read More »
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SEARCH FOR SQUAREPANTS
It’s been too long since we’ve had a new film about the hero of Bikini Bottom, and THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SEARCH FOR SQUAREPANTS is the perfect holiday present from the fine folks who have been animating him since 1999. This time out, SpongeBob longs to be a swashbuckler and finds himself caught up in a… Read More »