Going to the movies can be overwhelming these days, in whatever year this is. There are so many choices! This weekend alone there are three big films opening in wide release: Christopher Nolan’s World War II drama Dunkirk; Luc Besson’s space fantasy adventure Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets; and Malcolm D. Lee’s […]
Read more
With Dunkirk, writer-director Christopher Nolan, most famous for his Batman trilogy but even better at mind-benders like Memento and Inception, applies his cerebral skillset to another familiar genre: the World War II movie. Rather than turn the true story into a puzzle, Nolan keeps the plot simple and delivers an intense, carefully calibrated mini-epic about surviving […]
Read more
There’s aging badly and then there’s Revenge of the Nerds. What passed for collegiate underdog hijinks in 1984 goes by different terms today — like rape, unlawful surveillance, and revenge porn. We’re supposed to cheer when Robert Carradine’s head nerd, Lewis Skolnick, beds a cheerleader who thinks he’s her quarterback boyfriend and wins her heart […]
Read more
There isn’t much battle action in War for the Planet of the Apes, but it still feels like a war movie — a World War II movie, specifically, set largely in a wintry prison camp, with some captives collaborating with the enemy in the vain hope of postponing their own deaths while others make escape […]
Read more
I love rewatching my favorite movies. When you sit down to view any film, you approach it with your own experience and meet it in the middle. Then, over time, you change and your viewpoints change and you can derive and add new meaning by rewatching something that, unless George Lucas was involved, hasn’t changed […]
Read more
It’s easy to criticize Hollywood decision-makers for how often they take the easy way out, whether it’s putting white Englishmen in their ancient Egyptian epics or overloading films with men and including one woman. But where they often get a litany of passes is the casting of able-bodied actors to play disabled characters. I complain […]
Read more
In a way, the most important relationship in Beatriz at Dinner is the one between the title character and someone who only appears in a handful of photographs. Played by a noticeably deglamorized Salma Hayek — for whom the role was tailor-made by director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White — Beatriz is a holistic […]
Read more
Some superhero movies have subtitles referring to the dramatic events or villains featured therein: Apocalypse, The Age of Ultron, Civil War, The Last Stand. Then there’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, which refers to a dance at Peter Parker’s high school. Yes, the new incarnation of the web-slinger is a scrawny 15-year-old who’s at least as concerned about […]
Read more
When Edgar Wright premiered his new film, Baby Driver, earlier this year at SXSW, critics and viewers were quick to compare it to La La Land. Both films centered around the budding romance between a soulful, brooding would-be musician and a peppy, dreamy coffee shop waitress; both were set to music from start to finish; […]
Read more
When Clint Eastwood starred in the 1971 Don Siegel drama The Beguiled, it was in the hopes of pushing his image beyond the spaghetti Western antihero or misplaced musical star (yes, we remember Paint Your Wagon). The Beguiled gave Eastwood the opportunity to play a romantic lead, and much of the 90-minute runtime has Eastwood […]
Read more
At face value, 1981’s Neighbors is The Blues Brothers Take Suburbia. The yellowed cover of my VHS copy calls it “A Comic Smash” and promises “Belushi and Aykroyd are at it again and the results are uproarious!” without a hint of attribution, making both statements about as legally binding as the GoodTimes Home Video slogan, […]
Read more
Admittedly, Baby Driver employs a gimmick. Written and directed by the impossibly clever Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), the film’s main character is a getaway driver who times his crew’s bank robberies to be in sync with his iPod, which has an eclectic playlist of pop/rock songs that are heard not just […]
Read more