The Craft: Legacy certainly has its heart in the right place, but the effort ultimately amounts to little more than superficial virtue signaling. The easiest observation to make about The Craft: Legacy, the reboot/sequel to 1996 cult favorite The Craft, is that it is woke.…
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…
Though not wanting for the anticipated grisly violence or digressions into pop pastiche, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood might be Quentin Tarantino’s sweetest, most thoughtful, and most tender film in a couple of decades — at least since Jackie Brown. While Tarantino himself…
When Men in Black debuted in 1997, it was as an amiable goof, Ghostbusters with aliens, a delight. The then-cutting edge special effects and breezy chemistry between its two leads largely covered for the fact that there wasn’t much plot relative to its universe-expanding premise,…
As a title, Hell Like Heaven serves to explain the clashing contradictions that bring about the joys in The Peggies’ music. The Japanese trio’s buzzing, jagged alt-rock riffs are virtually hot to the touch, while their lyrics deal with the soft, almost cheesy expressions…
Tired of superhero origin stories? Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is here to fix that. The film’s nominal hero is Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), who’s bitten one day by a radioactive spider and, well, you know the rest. Or at least you think you do.…
The new Rosalía album has been promoted by the press as a deliberate synthesis of the Catalonian artist’s modern flamenco sound (as defined on last year’s beautiful, cavernous Los Ángeles) and the R&B and hip-hop music that the millennial’s attentions have drifted toward in her…
The Equalizer provided a perfectly serviceable delivery device for bloody violence. The 2014 film starred Denzel Washington as former C.I.A. assassin-turned-neighborhood do-gooder Robert McCall, who memorably carved up, blew up, dismembered, or otherwise mangled a dozen or so bad guys in a hardware store during the film’s climax,…
Fanboy darling Edgar Wright has certainly earned his reputation as a passionate pastiche artist and intricate stylist; his genre-infused films pair narratives of arrested male development with whiplash camerawork and razor-sharp editing. That skill and craftsmanship is fully on display in Baby Driver, but it’s undercut here by a…
Shinjuku Swan, an adaptation of Ken Wakui’s manga series, finds director Sion Sono at his slickest, glossiest, and most impersonal. Set in the bustling titular section of Tokyo, specifically the Kabukicho red-light district, the film follows the travails of the bleached blond-maned Tatsuhiko (Go…
