Another in an emerging subgenre of films featuring Tom Hanks in desperate situations, Greyhound is a visually clean, tactically-minded, and workmanlike effort from Aaron Schneider. Two things set Greyhound apart: its clean visual geometry and its narrative economy. We’re all prepared for a WW2…
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…
Ostensibly a spinoff from 2016’s Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey wisely abandons most of that film’s macho swagger — and, much more pointedly, its iteration of the Joker character — in favor of some easily digestible pop feminism in the form of a softened…
It’s not entirely fair to ding Bad Boys For Life for not being a Michael Bay movie, but late into the notorious climax of Bay’s 2003 monsterpiece Bad Boys II, the Bad Boys sneak a small army into Cuba and barely escape the minefields…
The last time J.J. Abrams came near a Star Wars movie it was to kickstart a new trilogy with The Force Awakens, which was both celebrated as a return to cosmetic and structural form after George Lucas’ truly inspired but often bizarre prequel series.…
Arguably the most indelible Broadway show of all time, it might be surprising that Cats took nearly forty years to be turned into a movie. At least until you see the movie they made. The King’s Speech’s Tom Hooper has put away the 18mm…
A Tinder date between the two title characters in Queen & Slim (Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya, respectively) goes horribly wrong after they get pulled over by a cop (Sturgill Simpson, weirdly) so cartoonishly racist that he draws his gun when Slim mentions that…
Though he didn’t invent it, James Mangold so perfected the Hollywood biopic/true story template with Walk the Line that they made a beat-for-beat parody of it in Walk Hard, so he might as well have. In Ford v Ferrari, he aims that factory efficiency…
Playing out with an advocacy doc’s briskness and efficiency of exposition rather than a suspenseful chronicle of investigative journalism, Scott Z. Burns’ The Report is closer to something like Spotlight than the more formally aggressive and elegant All the President’s Men or Zodiac. And…
The Irishman tells the probably-not-entirely-true story of Robert DeNiro’s Frank Sheeran, using cutting-edge visual effects technology to place him inside some of the most important events in American history, right next to a lot of famous people, many of whom wind up dead. It’s…
