Castle Falls isn’t the DTV flick of the year that it’s inspired pairing teases, but its a solid little actioner that doesn’t overstay its welcome. DTV action cinema’s greatest star Scott Adkins teams up with the legendary Dolph Lundgren (who also directs) for Castle Falls,…
House of Gucci is relentlessly entertaining spectacle, utterly soapy and only occasionally undermined by some bland prestige film sheen. Ridley Scott goes two-for-two this year, first with the under-appreciated The Last Duel and now with the perverse, classed-up House of Gucci, a pitch-black, extremely dry…
Afterlife is more rehash than reinvention of the Ghostbusters brand, cloying and desperate in its mode of pure nostalgia. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is an almost purely nostalgic experience, but it remains unclear what exactly the film is nostalgic for. Sure, 1984’s Ghostbusters was a big summer hit, but ultimately…
The Feast is a fine feature debut for Jones, building an effectively eerie tone and supporting it with lovely compositions and gnarly inserts. Lee Haven Jones’ The Feast is rather a perfect companion to fellow SXSW title Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, touching on all…
Red Notice is as close to an algorithm-written film as the world has yet had the displeasure of viewing. A few years back, there was a recurring social media meme about plugging a bunch of scripts for movies from whatever given genre into an AI…
Finch is entirely predictable and low stakes, but the duo of nice-guy Hanks and a cute pup musters enough pleasant earnestness to keeps things afloat. Sometime in the future, a massive solar flare has left Earth a ruin. The sun’s rays will cook you where…
Eternals makes its aims clear, but the whole enterprise is frictionless, resulting in one of the most flavorless Marvel films to date. Meet the Eternals, featured in Marvel’s interminable newest installment bearing their name. A band of ageless superheroes brought to Earth eons ago…
Snakehead foregrounds its lead actress to magnificent effective, offering a film far more singular than its generic setup suggests. Snakehead starts with a rather deceptively benign premise that promises a much more generic film than is actually on offer. A Chinese immigrant gets mixed up…
Villeneuve’s Dune is a gorgeous, monumental, and thrilling take on Herbert’s material, only slightly hampered by a weak finale that anticipates an intended Part Two. It’s the year 10,191. Interstellar space travel (and therefore the known universe) is dependent on a substance called Spice, which can…
Night Teeth is a generic, derivative DTV trifle that fails to make its vampire story vampy enough. Onto the heap of DTV detritus you can now toss Night Teeth, a wildly generic, timidly un-exciting modern-day vampires-in-LA jalopy that’s just completely undistinguished, right down to it’s…