Episode Description: This week, Summer Blockbuster!?! celebrates Valentine’s Day by taking on one of the least romantic romances ever filmed: 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon, directed by Prince. The pop icon followed up his smash hit Purple Rain with a black-and-white homage to screwball…
Judas and the Black Messiah energizes necessary rhetoric and is impeccably crafted, but diminishes its power by sticking so closely to a prescribed biopic template. The provocatively titled Judas and the Black Messiah is something of a trap, one that, from the boldness of its…
The Little Things is a stylistically bankrupt, psychologically facile yawn of a movie. Largely forgotten in all the talk these days about how modest studio films for adults aren’t really being made anymore is that, when they are, they’re usually lousy. Most are winding up…
Wonder Woman 1984 is bloated at 151 minutes, but the chemistry of its leads and throwback hokey vibes are enough to recommend its particular superhero pleasures. In case you couldn’t guess from the title, we catch up with Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), last seen just…
For all of Tenet’s ostensible narrative novelty and talk of the future, it is, in the end, a dismayingly familiar experience. It makes some degree of sense that a filmmaker so often lauded as “visionary,” yet who’s also expressed longstanding confusion at how mirrors…
On September 27, 2014, the CW Network cut animation out of their Saturday morning bloc. They were the last network to do so. It was replaced with live-action family-friendly series, mirroring a general trend away from expensive, skilled labor needed for cartoons and toward…
Ostensibly a spinoff from 2016’s Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey wisely abandons most of that film’s macho swagger — and, much more pointedly, its iteration of the Joker character — in favor of some easily digestible pop feminism in the form of a softened…
Over a decade before the Coen Brothers released their neo-noir, blood-soaked vision of Americana, Blood Simple, Terrence Malick’s Badlands etched into the public consciousness a particularly languid flavor of Midwestern cruelty. Loosely based on the true story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate’s…
Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, based on Jonathan Lethem’s novel, is by Norton’s own admission a passion project some 20 years in the making. It’s easy to see what would attract Norton to the role of Lionel Essrog, a sorta-kinda private detective investigating his boss and…
In the realm of unnecessary sequels, Stephen King’s follow-up novel to his beloved The Shining would seem to be running neck and neck for first place along with the movie adaptation of same. But Doctor Sleep comes for us all anyway, and believe it or…
