The Marksman is a sturdy and uncomplicated but mostly satisfying entry into the Neeson oeuvre of stoic, righteous masculinity. Another exercise in stoicism and dignified masculinity, replete with a dash of reactionary violence and a grizzled lead performance? Smells like a Liam Neeson movie. In…
“The Seattle Mariners are eminently lovable, profoundly human, and stunningly, outrageously weird.” These words come courtesy of Jon Bois, writer, editor, animator, producer, and director of the idiosyncratic and extraordinarily engaging The History of the Seattle Mariners. He’s describing its subject, but he might as…
Wonder Woman 1984 is bloated at 151 minutes, but the chemistry of its leads and throwback hokey vibes are enough to recommend its particular superhero pleasures. In case you couldn’t guess from the title, we catch up with Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), last seen just…
Promising Young Woman does its best to reshape the rape-revenge narrative into a novel form, but it ultimately fails to muster much ambiguity or thorniness. Heavy with all sorts of baggage though it may be, the exploitation subcategory known as rape-revenge is a little-loved, oft-misunderstood…
SKYLIN3S is a wonderfully weird and wild addition to the Skyline series and a bright star of the DTV renaissance. Anybody clocking the original Skyline way back in 2010, impressed or not with its no-budget narrative ambitions, probably didn’t expect that it would spawn an…
Archenemy nicely compensates for its budget with some bits of visual aplomb, but it amounts to little as the film frustratingly spends most of its time with its least interesting characters. Since everything is a superhero movie now, there’s even a sort of cottage industry…
Jiu Jitsu capitalizes on some playful camerawork and Nicolas Cage’s idiosyncratic presence to transcend its DTV trappings. Only in the realm of DTV could something so perfectly silly as Jiu Jitsu exist, and comfortably at that. A wily mash-up of Power Rangers, Predator, and Mortal…
Fatman is remains a bleak bit of dark holiday fun even as it fails to seize on its more potent genre possibilities. Somebody deserves proper credit for casting scruffy Mel Gibson, replete with his old, crusty madman look, as a disheveled, disillusioned Santa Claus in…
With On the Rocks, Sofia Coppola reconfigures her pet themes into a welcomingly settled film that plays a lot like an NYC-set Somewhere. “It must be very nice to be you.” That’s what Laura (Rashida Jones) says to her gadfly dad Felix (Bill Murray)…
Ben Wheatley’s Rebecca remake is an emotionally facile film devoid of either atmosphere or ambiguity. It’s easy to criticize any literary adaptation simply for straying from the text. Fealty to source material means a lot for fans of any book and it’s frequently the benchmark…
