When an Israeli pilot refused to take off for another shot out of sheer exhaustion, Menahem Golan threatened him at gunpoint until the landing gear left the ground. This early anecdote sets the tone for Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, a 2014 documentary about the company that gave us the misguided […]
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Few actors are better suited to play a diplomat than Jon Hamm, and the erstwhile Don Draper brings his gregarious A-game to Beirut, a compelling espionage flick directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Session 9) and written by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, the Jason Bourne series). We first meet Hamm’s glad-handing Mason Skiles in 1972, […]
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Blumhouse. The name has become synonymous with horror over the last decade. From macro-budget success stories to projects that make other production houses tremble, Blumhouse has proven itself repeatedly, with hits that include the Insidious, Sinister, and The Purge franchises. What makes the company thrive is the tenacity and foresight from CEO and owner Jason […]
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‘If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait till I get through with it.’ — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup Armando Iannucci’s historical farce The Death of Stalin — which traces the madcap scramble for power between members of Russia’s ruling Central Committee in the days following the titular predicament — has already […]
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Based on the infamous 1969 incident in which a young woman drowned after a probably-drunk Sen. Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge into a pond, Chappaquiddick is unusual for a docudrama in that its point of view is different from its main character’s. Our protagonist, 37-year-old Kennedy (played by Jason Clarke in big white […]
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Movie monsters have always symbolized our hidden fears and desires. It’s impossible to dissociate the hulking behemoth of Godzilla from the atomic bomb and Japan’s perception of the good ol’ U.S. of A. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula represented our fear of foreigners in the early ‘30s; the pod people of 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers […]
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It’s laudable to convert harmless childhood games into horror premises, but Truth or Dare does it with such rote blandness that the movie is actually less suspenseful than a real game of truth or dare. Directed by Jeff Wadlow (Cry_Wolf, Kick-Ass 2) from a screenplay credited to him and three other people, the film is meant […]
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Rampage is one of the better video-game-based movies, a low bar that it clears only by forsaking the entire premise of the game. The mid-80s arcade hit had one objective: with a giant gorilla, giant lizard, or giant wolf as your avatar, you destroy every building and eat every civilian you can get your hands or […]
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Howdy, amigos! Looks like the Earth spun around seven times and brought us to another edition of the Friday Movie Pile & Slang Terms for Being Drunk, the long-running weekly feature that is the Internet’s top source for new movie releases and euphemisms for intoxication. Accept no substitutes (unless they’re better somehow)! Rampage (PG-13, 1:47) […]
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As a proponent of the “shut up and watch the movie” school of thought, I have a special fondness for films that actively encourage silence. The tense and thrilling A Quiet Place does it by putting its characters in a situation where making noise is fatal and then making us forget that it’s only a movie. […]
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As a wise woman once said, “All movies are lies and anyone who watches them is a sinner.” OK, she wasn’t so much “wise” as she was “living in an old boat in the woods behind my house,” but it was said by someone and you can’t prove otherwise. Her spittle-firing maxim is certainly lent […]
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It is a time-honored tradition that teens in movies make pacts with one another to lose their virginity, but seldom are those teens female girls of the young lady gender! That makes Blockers different from the typical raunch-com — that, and the fact that it was directed and edited with some discipline and seems to have […]
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