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…
Stuntman is a more modest effort than similar docu-efforts, but greatly benefits from Braun’s sincerity and likability. On September 8, 1974, with a ton of hype and media fanfare, daredevil Evel Knievel tried — and spectacularly failed — to jump the mile-wide Snake River…
Partway through alleged French comedy Bloody Oranges is an epigraph from Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (yes, I had to look him up). It reads, “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” That was probably both…
Gunpowder Milkshake is a dog of a film, utterly derivative and lacking in any recommendable action spectacle. Take the weird mythology of the Johns Wick, the dipshit adolescent “feminism” of Sucker Punch, and the candy-coated pop of Birds of Prey, and you’d be close to…
The Tomorrow War is pure sci-fi cribbing, a regurgitated and ungainly monstrosity without a single novel idea. What do you say about a movie like The Tomorrow War? Its IMDb trivia page notes excitedly that it’s “the first film to be executively produced by Chris…
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…
The Ice Road doesn’t trust the straightforward formula of its actioner origins, needlessly complicating things to its detriment. It’s 2021 and the Liam Neeson Action Machine continues unabated with yet another low-budget thriller wherein Neeson plays a principled but determined outsider forced into a…
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…
Werewolves Within doesn’t deliver many scares, but it hits an amusing, breezy target that too few horror-comedies manage. Finn (Sam Richardson) is the new forest ranger in the little town of Beaverfield, which, as friendly (and gossipy) mail carrier Cecily (Milana Vayntrub) tells him,…
