What is most striking about JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4, and JW:C4 is a very striking film, is how emotionally engaging it is as is goes about the business of filling the screen to bursting with gloriously choreographed, ultra-violent action sequences. What in other films of this ilk would provide a paper-thin motivation for its protagonists… Read More »
SCREAM VI
The Scream franchise is not one that wants to be taken seriously as a straight horror film. From the first iconoclastic installment so many years ago, its aim, it’s very raison d’être, was to call out the conventions of slasher films and then serve up a gory slashfest to an audience primed to laugh at… Read More »
MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE
Narrated with precocious prescience by a character too young to see the film on her own (or parts of the stage show within it at all), MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE asks the age-old question, “What do women want?” This being a film about a preternaturally talented male stripper, the answer can only be a lap… Read More »
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
And so, after a gap of over 13 years, James Cameron returns us to Pandora with an introduction that posits the most dangerous thing about that locale is that you may come to love her too much. Cameron is quite obviously smitten with his mythical planet whose inhabitants, the 8-foot-tall Na’avi, are more in tune… Read More »
HALLOWEEN ENDS
HALLOWEEN ENDS fulfills its promise to take the battle between Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers (unknown shape played by James Jude Courtney) to its limits. Boasting four writers, including director and purveyor of the franchise reboot, David Gordon Green, this excursion takes us, alas, into muddled waters. Myers, on the loose since… Read More »
HOCUS POCUS 2
If you were even mildly enchanted, amused, chilled, or any combination of those three, by the original HOCUS POCUS, I beg you to avoid the sequel at all costs. It is a travesty of a flick, and an insult to that darkly whimsical tale of 29 years ago. To remind you, it introduced us to… Read More »
THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER
It’s not that THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER is unwatchable. Quite the contrary. The special effects are stupendously unrestrained. The story is adorable, leaning towards a good-natured spoof of superhero movies as practiced in the 2020s. The performances can’t be faulted, even if Christian Bale as the god-hating ex-acolyte out for revenge is far darker, and… Read More »
MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU
There is a great deal of mileage to be had with characters as intrinsically adorable the Minions. And MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU takes it as far as it can go with a script that wobbles as uncertainly as Otto, the most loyal and least competent of little yellow creatures, does on the steep streets… Read More »
JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION
At two hours and twenty-six minutes, JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION is as hefty as the ginormous terrestrial behemoths that feature prominently in it, and it is just as ungainly. It lumbers along using the intertia of its sheer mass to propel along a story that is as dedicated to calling out classics as it is to… Read More »
TOP GUN : MAVERICK
I don’t know if TOP GUN:MAVERICK holds the record for the time elapsed between the original and the sequel, but if waiting over three decades results in a film as terrific as this, I hope filmmakers everywhere will at least consider taking their own sweet time when making sequels. This is an adrenalin-junkie’s fantasy, tightly… Read More »
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