The Happytime Murders is a dismal execution of a great premise, in which puppets (think Muppets) live alongside humans in Los Angeles as second-class citizens, the way toons and people did in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. When the felt cast members of a popular ’90s TV show start dying, grizzled puppet P.I. Phil Philips (Bill […]
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A.X.L., a wholesome boy-and-his-dog adventure and an inoffensive PG trifle, is patterned after The Iron Giant — a good role model for any movie to emulate, though obviously a hard one to measure up to. It also has shades of Short Circuit, E.T., and the like, being the story of an underdog teenage motocrosser named Miles […]
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Papillon is based on the memoirs of Henri Charrière, a 1930s French safecracker who was sent to an inescapable penal colony from which he subsequently (spoiler alert) escaped. But it’s also based on the 1973 film version of those memoirs (screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr. are officially credited) and hews closely to it. […]
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Sorry to Bother You writer-director Boots Riley recently took to social media to criticize Spike Lee’s new movie BlacKkKlansman — based on the true story of a black Colorado Springs police detective’s undercover infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s — for what he perceived as the film’s pro-police message and altering of the historical […]
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Based on the evidence of their early shorts and first two features – 2009’s Amer and 2013’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears – Belgian filmmakers Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet have internalized the tropes of the giallo to such a degree that they don’t need to quote directly from the films that inspire […]
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If you’re looking for something scary at the multiplexes, you can check out The Meg (Eric’s review) which is not all that scary but it is kind of fun, or Slender Man (Eric’s review) which is neither scary nor fun. But if you’re willing to go digging through the VOD channels you can always find […]
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Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood is the movie version of the 2012 memoir Full Service, in which George Albert “Scotty” Bowers shared juicy details about his decades-long pimping for Tinseltown celebrities. Shot by director Matt Tyrnauer (Valentino: The Last Emperor) back in 2012-14 (I don’t know why it took so long to get […]
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They don’t make a lot of movies that are set in 18,000 B.C. and told entirely in made-up caveman languages, perhaps for obvious reasons. Nor is the theme of “where dogs came from” often explored in film, though that angle sounds a lot more lucrative. Here to fill those needs is Alpha, set 20 millennia […]
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Peter Berg, director of good movies like Friday Night Lights and The Rundown, has fallen in with a bad crowd lately, and that crowd’s name is Mark Wahlberg. After an auspicious start with Lone Survivor, each of their subsequent collaborations — Deepwater Horizon, Patriots Day, and now Mile 22 — has been worse than the one before […]
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I’ve loved rom-coms my entire life, somehow able to separate their regressive values from my general disdain for the patriarchy. Writers have rightfully spearheaded feminist critiques when discussing this genre, calling out its thin female protagonists and sexist jokes. But many ignore the other elephant in the room: The romantic comedy genre is so white […]
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There are two things about Crazy Rich Asians that separate it from most romantic comedies. One is that it’s good. Based on Kevin Kwan’s bestselling novel and directed by John M. Chu (Step Up 2: The Streets, Now You See Me 2), it uses one of the standard formulas, but the plot isn’t based on dumb lies […]
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Molding your cute little dumpling bun of a child takes care and practice. What to do when your sweet baby bun starts to rebel or brings home a girlfriend you don’t like? Jon M. Chu’s film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians and Domee Shi’s 8-minute Pixar short Bao (which played with Incredibles 2) share one […]
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