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…
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…
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 amusingly ludicrous outings, a trip into vague blaxploitation territory in Live and Let Die, or reaching for some of that Star Wars glory…
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 recreation The Walk. Detailing the astonishing 1974 tightrope walk performed by Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) between the newly-constructed World Trade…
