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 »
THE HOUSEMAID
Paul Feig has shown an intriguing cinematic progression from BRIDESMAIDS to THE HEAT and then to A SIMPLE FAVOR. A sly penchant, if you will, for films of the noir nature, a penchant that he brings to full fruition with THE HOUSEMAID. In this perfectly executed psychological thriller nothing and no one is quite that… Read More »
NUREMBERG
In a pivotal scene in James Vanderbildt’s NUREMBERG, it is 1945 and the judge tasked with finding a legal reason to hold an international tribunal to try the defeated Nazi leaders as war criminals has his first meeting with the Army psychiatrist tasked with evaluating the first 22 putative defendants for their fitness to stand… Read More »
WICKED: FOR GOOD
The one thing you can say about WICKED: FOR GOOD without fear of contradiction is that there is a lot of it. Not just the running time, which feels like so much more than 138 minutes, but in the Rococo exuberance of the production design. So much production design. It goes beyond mere attention to… Read More »
THE RUNNING MAN
In the 1970s, a simpler time, we had NETWORK, Paddy Chayefsky’s disturbingly prescient fever-dream of a black comedy about a television network run amorally amok thanks to a viewing audience with the attention span of a nudibranch and an alarming lack of critical thinking skills. We laughed and comforted ourselves that such extremes could never… Read More »
DEAD OF WINTER
There is much to admire about Emma Thompson in DEAD OF WINTER, not the least of which is the way she captures the cadence and the spirit of the Minnesota accent with the same effortless skill that embodies the rest of her performance. Virtually silent for most of her time on screen, she is simply… Read More »
THE LONG WALK
Stephen King started writing THE LONG WALK when the Vietnam War was still raging, and echoes of its impact on the psyche of the United States reverberate through the film version. In a near future dystopia, young men in the prime of life, struggling in a country economically ravaged by war, voluntarily sign up for… Read More »
SPINAL TAP 2: THE END CONTINUES
Perhaps the best news of this troubled summer is that SPINAL TAP 2: THE END CONTINUES is the equal of the original. Walking that fine line between stupid and clever, it is once again a razor-sharp satire of both the music business and documentary filmmaking, lacerating the pomposity and the venality of both with breathtaking… Read More »
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