Dividing Stephen King’s sprawling novel of repressed childhood trauma and inter-dimensional evil clowns into two parts not only made it easier to streamline It’s narrative, it also gave the studio an excuse to sell two movies. The first installment benefited greatly from excellent casting…
Where 2014’s Godzilla tried to take its cues from Ishiro Honda’s iconic 1954 introduction to the character, the new Godzilla: King of the Monsters skews a lot closer to Toho Studios’ more cartoonish, action-packed sequels that poured in during the 60’s and especially the 80’s.…
Lil Pump’s debut mixtape was founded on a shamelessly glorified materialism — with a side of inescapable sexual and moral depravity. The oppressive, lo-fi beats were basically secondary, thus Pump’s follow-up release — Harverd Dropout‘s lead single, “Eskeetit” — serves more as a genius…
Perhaps setting itself up as a corrective to the rest of the DC comics films, which are apparently perceived to be overly dark and serious, Shazam! [sic] is more kid-friendly fare, what with its host of adolescent characters, its good-natured it’s-about-family moralizing, and its relatively…
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is one of the least-sexy films ever made about sex. Libidinous, yes, and full of naked bodies in salacious motion, engaging in lubricious acts — but also off-putting, too meticulous to be arousing. Eyes Wide Shut is a dreamy traipse…
A Perfect World‘s title is contradictory, born from a phrase that implies that life will never really amount to what we want it to — but abbreviated, so as to suggest that the central relationship in Clint Eastwood’s film is a utopian alternative to the…
Imagine a script development meeting where everyone involved in making Aquaman sat down to solve one all-important question: “How do we make Aquaman cool?” Now imagine if the answer was, “What if we don’t?” After the DC comics cinematic universe failed to take off as…
Here’s a movie about Jason Statham fighting a gigantic killer prehistoric shark. That’s all it is. The Meg spends not much time setting up its premise (lifted from Renny Harlin’s Cliffhanger), with Statham’s washed up deep-sea rescue diver being pressed back into service after an on-the-job tragedy.…
Now that the dust has settled and the hype machine has moved on to newer, bigger spectacles, let’s examine the reception of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. Neither a runaway success nor a financial disaster, the film seems to have found the limits of…
What’s the use of rebooting a successful video game franchise if you can’t reboot the mediocre film series that it spawned? That appears to be the motivation behind the new Tomb Raider, which resembles nothing so much as a perfunctory early 2000s action programmer except that…
