When Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up chained to the wall in an underground doomsday bunker after a car accident, she finds herself the captive…
London Has Fallen is objectively a trash fire. It’s gleefully violent, front-to-back idiotic, desperately crummy-looking despite a reported budget of over one-hundred million, and politically reprehensible.…
So unreconstructed that it barely registers, John Hillcoat’s Triple 9 is a slickly crafted, but almost ruthlessly conventional crime thriller, winding up a handful of cops and…
Sticking to a reliable and remarkably elastic formula, the Coen brothers’ 1950s Hollywood farce Hail, Caesar! is, like Burn After Reading or Raising Arizona, another deceptively fluffy screwball…
Despite admonitions in the press materials and interviews with the principals, Michael Bay’s (maybe appropriately) dreaded Benghazi movie can’t possibly read as completely apolitical.…
The Hateful Eight often plays like a mean prank, and maybe that shouldn’t come as a surprise from Quentin Tarantino, who’s simultaneously one of the…
Ryan Coogler’s Rocky spin-off Creed begins, evocatively, in a juvenile corrections facility. A handsomely framed shot depicts a line of African-American boys filing through…
News to absolutely nobody: in 2008 a mounting, toxic combination of sheer cluelessness and outright lawbreaking caused the US housing market to collapse, leading…
At one point in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a much-older Han Solo (Harrison Ford, more engaged here than in a very long while)…
You actually get two movies in In the Heart of the Sea. One is a reasonably tight seafaring adventure yarn based on the true…
Combining what some have called his propensity for “arthouse miserablism” in films like Babel or Biutiful with a newfound fetish for conspicuous formal audacity…
After surviving multiple rounds of teenage gladiatorial combat, inadvertently inciting an armed uprising, and becoming a media darling and symbol for revolt against a…
Over the years the James Bond movies have fought to stay relevant in one way or another. Look at some of Roger Moore’s more…
Those who’ve seen James Marsh’s superior 2008 documentary Man on Wirewill be familiar with most of the narrative territory explored in Robert Zemeckis’s faithful…
Guillermo del Toro’s sympathies have always been with his orphan, discarded monsters: the aging vampire in Cronos, the beautiful, malevolent creatures of Pan’s Labyrinth, or the…
It’s hard to tell if Steve Jobs is better or worse for its general avoidance of “how we live now” handwringing. Even The Social Network, to which…
It’s not new to describe Steven Spielberg as a sort of father figure in Hollywood filmmaking. A film like War of the Worlds, just to take a…
Everest is based largely on Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, a true-life tale of survival and death atop the titular mountain that is, at its core,…