You know those Garry Marshall ensemble comedies like Mother’s Day and New Year’s Eve, where various strangers’ lives intersect around a particular theme? Dog Days is like that, only not terrible! Not great, either, but it’s sunny and tame and aimed at families, and at least the theme is dogs instead of something boring like mothers. Here’s […]
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Not much in the “wide release” department recently (but that’s about to change), so here’s a rundown of some of the more intriguing new releases in the “watch it at home” department. It’s a mixed bag, big time. But hey, sometime those are fun. Our House — What happens when a brilliant but impatient young […]
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Bo Burnham, the first YouTube comedian to leverage his online fame into a mainstream career, is 27 years old and a boy. Yet he has somehow written and directed Eighth Grade, a marvelously, horrifically authentic dramedy about an awkward and shy 13-year-old girl trying to navigate the last days of middle school. Maybe it’s not […]
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Now that Black Panther has dispelled the long-held belief that African-American movies don’t do well overseas, Hollywood is scrambling to green-light more black-led projects. But they don’t always get these attempts to cash in on diversity quite right, as evidenced by these titles and log lines now in production. So Bad He’s Good Willie Hunting […]
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With basic-cable production values and an exceedingly generic story, The Darkest Minds is the latest teenage dystopian fantasy film based on a trilogy of young adult novels in which a girl learns she is Very Special and becomes a leader in the fight against oppression. It’s harmless — unless you’re upset by the idea of children […]
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Disney’s Christopher Robin is not a biography of Christopher Robin Milne, the boy featured in his father A.A.’s Winnie-the-Pooh books. There was a movie last year, Goodbye, Christopher Robin, that told that story (more or less). This Disney version pretends we don’t know anything about the real Christopher Robin and tells a fictional story about the […]
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The two main characters in The Spy Who Dumped Me are ordinary women who get caught up in international espionage and turn out to be — what are the odds? — pretty good at it. They shoot villains with relative ease and accuracy, instinctively hide flash drives in their privates, pull switcheroos as if native-born to […]
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When Pineapple Express was released in the summer of 2008, it was seen as a major departure for director David Gordon Green, best known at the time for well-observed character studies like George Washington (2000), All the Real Girls (2002), and Undertow (2004, with executive producer Terrence Malick). All got four stars from no less […]
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The sixth Mission: Impossible movie was released 22 years and two months after the first one — say what you will about this franchise, they’re not crankin’ ’em out like sausages. There’s always a gap of at least three years between entries, as that’s how long it takes a new Tom Cruise clone to reach maturity […]
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Tom Cruise has been starring in Mission: Impossible movies for 22 years, and his character, un-killable super-spy Ethan Hunt, has been on the job for about the same length of time. Hunt isn’t an archetype like James Bond, kept forever young(-ish) by recasting the role and disregarding continuity. The things that happened to thirtysomething Ethan Hunt […]
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Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, the very meta big-screen adaptation of the Cartoon Network series Teen Titans Go!, is about a quintet of adolescent superheroes seeking to earn the same respect their adult counterparts get by doing what so many of them have done: starring in a movie. The idea occurs to the team […]
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It would seem rapper and activist Boots Riley watched a few Michel Gondry movies (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, etc.) and decided to make a whimsical, alternate-reality satire of his own. It’s called Sorry to Bother You, and it is indeed his own. Though the inventive visual style and narrative absurdity […]
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