Antebellum is a vapid, one-gimmick flick that plays like a politically impotent episode of Black Mirror. There’s still plenty of debate over cinematic depictions of slavery specifically and the abuse of Black bodies in general. Movies like Django Unchained, 12 Years a Slave, and Detroit, to name just a…
Mulan fails as action spectacle and lazily cribs from the vast cinematic legacy it so loosely approximates. After such massive financial successes as Beauty and the Beast and especially last year’s The Lion King, it was of course highly unlikely that Disney would stop mining their…
For all of Tenet’s ostensible narrative novelty and talk of the future, it is, in the end, a dismayingly familiar experience. It makes some degree of sense that a filmmaker so often lauded as “visionary,” yet who’s also expressed longstanding confusion at how mirrors…
Face the Music doesn’t possess the rambunctious energy of its predecessors, but is hopeful and good-natured in a way too few comedies achieve these days. Just before Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan hop into their time-traveling phone booth for another leg of…
Peninsula is admittedly better than most recent zombie fare, but is reflective of an overall cinematic failure to innovate the genre. The zombie film is, at this point, a cinematic staple. Given the sheer number of zombie narratives over the past decade, any qualitative assessment…
To understand the ostensible intent of Jon Stewart’s latest film, Irresistible, it’s best to begin at the end: “Money lived happily ever after…reveling in its outsized influence over American politics,” a postscript reads. This is a uniquely unifying idea in contemporary America, one that…
Judd Apatow has built and padded his filmography on a basic principle: construct vehicles for comic actors in the early days of their ascending stardom – Steve Carrell in The 40-Year Old Virgin, Seth Rogen in Knocked Up, Amy Schumer in Trainwreck (the outlier…
After a six month delay resulting from various media outlets labelling the film, sight unseen, as “dangerous Liberal propaganda,” Craig Zobel’s horror-comedy The Hunt finally makes its way to theaters. In an inspired move, producer Jason Blum took a page out of the William…
There is a lot wrong with Onward, Pixar’s highly uninspired 22nd feature film. Its most surprising fault, though, is its complete lack of detail. Sure, it remains present aesthetically, in its gorgeous photorealistic backdrops and in each carefully tousled hair atop the head of…
From the 1933 original to Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, the cinematic iterations of Invisible Men have generally dealt with how a lack of accountability tends to bring out the worst in people, and they typically grant already somewhat sociopathic or narcissistic male characters with…
