Ever since Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson entered the franchise with Fast Five, the Fast & Furious films have increasingly distanced themselves from their now-quaint LA…
To say that Polkadot Stingray rose to fame overnight might be a bit dramatic — but not too far off. The group only formed in…
Us begins with a sincerely spooky prologue taking place in 1986, when young Addy wanders away from her bickering parents at the Santa Cruz boardwalk and…
There’s a lengthy, terrific scene in Glass, in which the protagonists — three people with extraordinary abilities — are confronted both by each other and by…
Whatever its flaws (and they are myriad), director David Gordon Green’s Halloween is certainly a good looking film: Cinematographer Michael Simmonds mimics John Carpenter’s 1978 original…
It could be that Stephen Susco, the first-time director of improbable horror-sequel Unfriended: Dark Web, is just a previously-undistinguished virtuoso, here aided by a team…
Nearly 30 years on, to the day, from the release of Die Hard — the movie about a guy fighting terrorists in a really tall building…
Just in time for an ironic Independence Day release, The First Purge is another meaningless prequel that answers questions no one asked or needed answered. While it seems undeniably important…
The first and certainly most beloved of the Jurassic Park films sums up the entire franchise with a single line, when Sam Neill’s Grant first…
Picking up 10 years after the events of Pacific Rim, Pacific Rim: Uprising follows Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the son of Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost from the first film, as…
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 comedy…
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 dying…
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 this…
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, both…
M. Night Shyamalan might be on the ropes both in terms of his critical perception and industry clout. His last four films were widely (it could…
Slick, loud, violent, merchandized to death, politically retrograde, largely scrubbed of idiosyncrasy, and also pretty exciting, Jurassic World is, like the original 1993 Jurassic Park, simultaneously we-tampered-in-God’s-domain overreacher…
You can claim to be invested in the Fast and/or Furious series for fancy cars, or for the characters and the laid-back diversity of the cast, or…
Blackhat opens with a CG-animated representation of a block of data infiltrating a computer network. A tiny glowing grid sliding along a superconducting surface with…
Comparable to reading a biography with informative chunks ripped out, leaving gaping holes aplenty in the narrative, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken is little more than an…
After opening with a swaggering bit of drunken police violence, Scott Frank’s A Walk Among the Tombstones spends its runtime bathing in its characters’ moral…
It’s an acknowledged perceptual truth that we tend to ignore things about ourselves and the world around us that are uncomfortable to deal with. John…