Snake Eyes is all boring backstory and cliched tropes, and not remotely as weird as the material demands. Apparently, it’s absurdly hard to make a good movie out of a beloved ’80s cartoon that was essentially a glorified toy commercial for children. Although there…
Old suffers a bit from Shyamalan’s weaknesses as a writer, but by its end, ranks as one of the director’s weirdest and most poignant works yet. If there’s a single unifying force behind the films of M. Night Shyamalan, it’s their outright insistence upon requiring…
Space Jam 2 musters an engaging mid-film stretch, but it ultimately sinks under the weight of its overbearing corporate IP. Warner Brothers did their best to persuade Michael Jordan to sign on for Space Jam 2, following the box office success of the 1996…
Black Widow is fairly lightweight and doesn’t impress much with its action or visual design, but the character work and comedy prove somewhat redemptive. Although it takes place sometime between the events of Civil War and Infinity War, Black Widow begins in the mid-’90s, with…
No Sudden Move is another successful crime caper from Soderbergh, as formally and tonally playful as his best efforts in the genre. The endlessly versatile Steven Soderbergh returns to crime noir with No Sudden Move, a brisk, thoughtful, and sly period-set thriller with a stacked…
Against all odds, Family Business manages to be a wild, engaging sequel to the interminable original Boss Baby. Dreamworks Animation has always shown a penchant for producing would-be “edgy” family fare, the kinds of films that work overtime in presenting as kid-centric in their storytelling while…
The Forever Purge is suitably cynical and cathartic effort, righting some of the series’ previous wrongs and more bluntly tackling America’s systemic evils. Since James DeMonaco’s first film, The Purge series has found success in increasingly foregrounding its ideological concerns with each successive effort, making…
F9 continues the franchise’s downward trend, further garbling its outsized action and sentimentality into confectionery pap. What started as a scrappy gearhead ripoff of Point Break in 2001’s The Fast and the Furious has now become a lumbering, endless Saturday morning cartoon in F9: The…
Luca is an obviously gorgeous film, but its half-cooked conception and execution continues the recent trend of sub-par Pixar efforts. The currently swirling rumors which claim that Luca is Pixar’s family-friendly version of Call Me By Your Name can safely be set aside. Sure, the…
Peter Rabbit 2 wishes it were a Paddington film. It isn’t. It’s fair to say Will Gluck’s Peter Rabbit 2 wants a piece of the Paddington pie. Gluck’s film certainly shares plenty with those cultishly adored bear movies, being films about CGI animals sharing living space…
