We didn’t need another X-Men movie. Ever since the raucous pastiche of the original Deadpool and the bloated, redundant X-Men: Apocalypse, it seemed clear that Fox’s mutant movies had run their course. But that didn’t stop another from stumbling into theaters a few weeks ago with the disastrous Dark Phoenix, a film that instantly wore […]
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As a big fat blockbuster superhero movie opening July Fourth weekend, Spider-Man: Far from Home doesn’t quite work. But perhaps that’s because director Jon Watts — along with screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers — have done such an excellent job plotting a cute, low-stakes teen summer romance, Italian style (Gidget Goes to Rome for the […]
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(Editor’s Corner is where Eric talks about overlooked gems, film history, or whatever else he wants to talk about because he’s the boss and no one can stop him.) I started covering the Sundance Film Festival for real in 2000, but the year before that I reviewed two movies on assignment for the Utah newspaper […]
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Friends, critics, countrymen, I come to offer faint praise for Ophelia, not to bury her. See? Lifting from several of Shakespeare’s greatest works is pretty fun (and kind of sloppy). Just ask Australian director Claire McCarthy (Little Hands, The Waiting City) and Canadian screenwriter Semi Chellas (whose credits include a few indies as well as […]
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You know him — there’s one of him in every circle of loose acquaintances: the guy (or gal or nonbinary pal — gender is irrelevant here) who has made worshipping The Beatles part of their personality. Despite being born at least a decade after the band parted ways, he knows all of the lyrics to […]
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It has escaped few moviegoers’ notice that within the last week three movies about sentient dolls have been released: Toy Story 4, Child’s Play, and Annabelle Comes Home. Given the chaotic nature of multiplexes and the incompetence of parents, it’s easy to see how confusion may arise. And so, in response to an emergency request […]
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Annabelle Comes Home is part of the Conjuring franchise, but you don’t need to have seen any of those movies (which also include The Nun and The Curse of La Llorona) to understand what’s going on here, which is that there’s a creepy doll that isn’t possessed per se but that is a conduit for […]
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(Editor’s Corner is where Eric talks about overlooked gems, film history, or whatever he wants to talk about because he’s the boss and no one can stop him.) In terms of lasting, positive impact, 1964 was a watershed year. The Civil Rights Act was passed, officially (if not yet literally) ending segregation. The Beatles and […]
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Toy Story 3 was such a perfect culmination to the series that any Toy Story 4 is going to be met with wariness. The Toy Story 4 we got does nothing to allay those concerns — it is, as expected, an unnecessary addition, though I do like where the characters all end up — and it’s […]
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Noted French pervert Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, Lucy) is back with another story of a badass woman who happens to be everything a horny screenwriter could want her to be — avidly bisexual, eager to sleep with men she works with, doesn’t talk a lot — in Anna, a loopy chunk of Eurotrash starring […]
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There’s something different about Chucky in the new Child’s Play remake. Originally birthed as a very creepy-looking killer doll possessed by the spirit of a wise-cracking fugitive serial killer through some sort of very un-P.C. voodoo magic in the mean, lean 1988 film of the same name, the 2019 Chucky (voiced by Mark Hamill) is […]
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