Every now and then I want to say “Just go see this film” and let the discovery of each revelation be the adventure it was meant to be. PROJECT HAIL MARY, based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, presents that problem. If you want my advice, then suffice to say that this life-and-death… Read More »
SEND HELP
The fruits of entitlement face off with workers controlling the means of production in Sam Raimi’s scathingly brilliant, and wickedly funny, take on gender politics and economic power, SEND HELP. Sure, we’ve seen this scenario before in THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON, SWEPT AWAY (the Wertmuller version, please), and most recently in TRIANGLE OF SADNESS, which owes… Read More »
CRIME 101
Click here for the flashback interview with Bart Layton for AMERICAN ANIMALS. Sometimes an ending can make or break a film. And so it is with CRIME 101, a thoughtful meditation on what happens when following the rules just doesn’t pay off. The payoff to a narrative that could have used some tightening is not… Read More »
GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE
It is like cinema has burst forth into the full flower of distinctly new genre, this one about the zeitgeist’s paranoia about AI. Never mind it taking jobs. The very worst it can do is infantilize us into a state of perpetual psychological impotence. The emergence of this genre was a slow build from the… 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 »
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