Solo: A Star Wars Story opens in a few days, and everyone is supremely excited because making a prequel to Star Wars is a slam-dunk idea that can’t fail. Most fans are content to sit back and wait for the film to open, but true fans know that waiting is for “nerf herders.” Secrecy is […]
Read more
This is a user-defined post excerpt. It should be displayed in place of the post content in archive-index pages.
Read more
Deadpool came in like a comet in 2016, grossing $783.1 million worldwide — fantastic for any movie, but unheard of for a hard-R superhero movie. Audiences responded to Ryan Reynolds’ Bugs-Bunny-on-meth take on the character, and to the way the film didn’t believe in a fourth wall and poked fun at the superhero genre. But […]
Read more
In Avengers: Infinity War, Josh Brolin is big and purple. His Thanos is the film’s lynchpin and its main character almost by default. Although his quest — to halve the world’s population with a bunch of magical MacGuffins — is fairly conventional for superhero fare, Brolin’s performance is not. Thanos is quiet and focused. He’s […]
Read more
This week’s “good enough, I guess, if you’re not too picky” home-invasion thriller is Breaking In,”which offers the innovative twist of the bad guys getting inside and holding the kids captive while the mom is locked outside and has to “break in,” as it were. What will those geniuses in Hollywood come up with next?! […]
Read more
You’ll think you’ve seen Life of the Party before, or at least something very much like it: A dowdy, newly divorced mom goes back to college to finish her degree — and it’s the same college her daughter is attending! Collision course with wackiness, no? Mom embarrasses daughter, whose friends think Mom is fun; Mom realizes […]
Read more
My brother and I like to bother each other and those around us with a game of soundtracks: When a deep, dark cut from a movie comes on the radio, one of us will turn to the other, smile like an executioner looking for a fresh neck, and ask: “What’s it from?” The song could […]
Read more
This month marks the 10th anniversary of David Mamet’s mixed-martial-arts thriller Redbelt. In the intervening years, Mamet — the preeminent American playwright of his day, and one of the few screenwriters considered an auteur even when someone else directs his scripts — has been in something of an exile from Hollywood, one that seems only […]
Read more
The rape-revenge sub-genre has many entries, and everything about Revenge (including the title) sounds derivative until you get to the credits. How many movies on this topic were written and directed by women? This one, a cool, synth-scored empowerment anthem from French first-timer Coralie Fargeat, turns the exploitation model on its head by delivering more male […]
Read more
There are two premises in Bad Samaritan, one that drives the plot and one that explains the villain’s motives. They are middling premises, better than some you’ve heard, less creative than others. They’re executed with average skill by director Dean Devlin, the longtime schlock writer (Independence Day, Godzilla [1998]) who made his behind-the-camera debut with last […]
Read more
Diablo Cody’s screenwriting career started with a pregnant teenager named Juno. She returns to the subject of maternity with Tully, but there’s a crucial difference this time: Cody has three kids of her own now, an experience that informs her painfully funny and sympathetic portrait of postpartum exhaustion. She’s reunited with Juno director Jason Reitman, and […]
Read more
Any remake of the 1987 Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell “romantic” “comedy” Overboard would have to reverse the genders. A single father of three rowdy boys tricking a rich, mean amnesiac woman into believing she’s his wife — that is to say, cook, nanny, and housekeeper — feels cruel and misogynistic now. We do NOT gaslight women in […]
Read more