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…
Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home for Asian action films of all stripes and budgets, but rarely are two films so perfectly contrasted against each other in terms…
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…
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…
Poor, meek Matt Furie. The San Francisco cartoonist doesn’t seem like he has an indecent or aggressive quality to his name, but his innocent creation Pepe the Frog, from his 2006 comic Boys Club, somehow wound up a twisted mascot for right-wing hate speech.…
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.…
