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…
One of 2020’s greatest mysteries is how a film like Guest House received funding? Ostensibly conceived as a star vehicle for the Laurence Olivier of ‘90s high-concept comedies — which could only ever refer to former MTV VJ Pauly Shore — perhaps the producers…
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…
With Knives Out, American director Rian Johnson has traded in Dashiell Hammet — the inspiration for his 2005 debut feature Brick — for the locked-room murder mysteries of Agatha Christie. In but one of the movie’s stridently self-aware touches, the setting is the estate…
It’s hard to believe that rocker turned horror auteur Rob Zombie would become one of the most divisive filmmakers of the 21st century. His debut feature, 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses, was fetishistic in its re-creation of ’70s-era exploitation flicks, right down his use…
After thwarting the terrorist takeovers of both Washington, D.C. in Olympus Has Fallen and in London, in — naturally — London Has Fallen, legendary Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) returns. And if the title here is meant to make any sense whatsoever,…
