The attention-grabbing pitch for Jojo Rabbit — a little German boy near the end of World War II has an imaginary friend, and it’s Hitler — is ultimately secondary in importance to the film’s more serious, sentimental themes. That the film, adapted and directed by Taiki Waititi from Christine Leunens’ novel Caging Skies, uses dark […]
Read more
In the Shadow of the Moon (on Netflix) is a reasonably OK science-fiction police procedural that begins with a flash-forward to 2024, where Philadelphia is in ashy ruins and the U.S. flag has been reconfigured to have five big stars instead of 50 little ones. With this indication that The Future will be involved in […]
Read more
We knew on Jan. 1, 2000, that the hysteria surrounding Y2K had been overblown. But before that, the fears that the so-called “Millennium Bug” would cause computers to cease working (or, at the very least, display the wrong date) had engendered a hundred-billion-dollar cottage industry of emergency patches and software upgrades to mitigate a problem […]
Read more
Ever since the proliferation of the mobile phone, horror filmmakers have to go out of their way to explain why their characters can’t use them to get out of whatever horror-movie scenario they’ve landed in. Either someone complains they can’t get a signal – prompting everyone else in the group to whip theirs out to […]
Read more
You’re familiar with the type of movie where a best-of-the-best secret agent is betrayed by his own government and must go on the run. Gemini Man is a very basic one of those with one twist: The assassin sent to kill our secret agent is his clone. Maybe this is on me for not finding clones […]
Read more
The animated reboot of The Addams Family, set in the present day, has everyone’s favorite spooky Goth family (or second-favorite if you were more of a Munsters person) in conflict with a new neighborhood that has popped up nearby called Assimilation, in which sameness is celebrated over individuality. The subdivision is owned (?) by one […]
Read more
It’s a tale as old as time: Married astronaut begins torrid affair with recently divorced co-worker; co-worker breaks off relationship, gets new girlfriend; married astronaut puts on adult diaper to drive 900 miles to Florida (because of course Florida) to confront ex-lover’s new girlfriend, armed with pepper spray. Pour out one glass of recycled urine […]
Read more
The fictional metropolis of Gotham has long been a stand-in for New York City, and with Joker, director Todd Phillips borrows (you might even say outright steals) from several New York movies of the 1970s and early ‘80s that showed the city’s skuzzier side, including The King of Comedy (1983), Taxi Driver (1976), Death Wish […]
Read more
Quiz Show opens with a sale. Its first scene follows investigator Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) as he speaks with a car salesman about the latest and greatest Chrysler 300. He learns about its features: a state-of-the-art radio, 17 coats of paint, and more power than anyone in Washington. The salesman does his job. We never […]
Read more
Perhaps the most notable example of a prominent movie genre that disappeared almost entirely is the Western. Once inescapable — there were close to 100 Westerns released in 1949 alone — nowadays Westerns are usually seen as retro or niche. The fading prevalence of the genre was observantly foreshadowed by two films released 50 years […]
Read more
Being the origin story of the title villain, Joker is technically a Batman prequel and technically a comic book movie, but director and co-writer Todd Phillips (The Hangover, Old School) doesn’t want you to think of it as those things. He’s going for a gritty Martin Scorsese vibe — The King of Comedy specifically (most of […]
Read more
Film is a strange medium. It requires creating images and moments that must have the semblance of reality but which are totally fictional. At least, that’s the conceit — more often than not, a little (or more) truth bleeds into the material, consciously or otherwise, and the lines between reality and fiction become blurred. Several […]
Read more