Though technically a worse film than the original, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard rides its low-brow wave to lizard brain delights. 2017’s The Hitman’s Bodyguard proved a bit of a sleeper hit, reconfiguring a Midnight Run-ish classic buddy caper picture as straight-up EuropaCorp-style trash, complete with…
Endangered Species is a lean, mostly successful little thriller that proves director Bassett’s legitimate genre chops. It’s difficult to remember now, but the last decades of the 20th century were a golden age of animal adventure tales, whether geared towards kids (The Bear, Homeward Bound,…
Spiral fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of the Saw franchise, deviating from the series formula to remarkably diminished results. Spiral: From the Book of Saw is but the latest attempt to reboot the infamous Saw franchise, a horror series so popular that it essentially kicked off the entire…
Vanquish is bad, bizarrely so, but it’s at least not boring in its own dumpster fire way. After a few hits as a writer, including Midnight Run, George Gallo has spent his career “directing” movies that seem suspiciously fake. Exhibit A: last year he…
Voyagers is a shallow, bland, and empty-headed space-set riff of Lord of the Flies that fails to choose either heady futurism or sci-fi eroticism. It’s not a great sign that even attempting a description of Neil Burger’s banal Voyagers is a bit of a…
Chaos Walking welcomingly deviates from the YA template and surprises with its visual design, but it crumbles under the weight of its unexplored ideas. From its conception to this, its theatrical bow at last, Chaos Walking has remained a legitimate oddity. The choice to christen…
Barb and Star plays to Wiig’s most overindulgent and weirdo instincts, failing to strike the balance of her best comedic work. The career path forged by Kristen Wiig is one of the stranger journeys to emerge out of Hollywood in recent years. After finding breakout…
The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee delivers what no one was asking for — a film featuring an octogenarian Paul Hogan and a litany of senior citizen cameos delivering dated references and lazy jokes with no payoff. The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee is a strange film…
Smiley Face Killers is a fascinating failure; not a good film, but frequently a compelling one. Brett Easton Ellis has never written a sympathetic character in his entire career. There are two types of people to be found in an Ellis opus: young, pretty, and vacuous or…
With direct-to-video/streaming action films now a bonafide cottage industry with their own tropes, star filmmakers and performers, and aesthetic trappings, the real mediocrities are becoming more and more prominent and are seemingly attracting a classier pedigree of talent. Hence, The Doorman. It stars Australian…
