Oppenheimer (2023)
DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan
CAST: Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh
REVIEW:
Ambitious director Christopher Nolan has called Oppenheimer—-a biopic of the “father of the atom bomb”, American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, largely working off the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin—-his most challenging project to date, but while its ambition and technical accomplishments are admirable, Oppenheimer like Interstellar and Dunkirk before it also falls victim to some of Nolan’s increasingly self-indulgent less admirable qualities. There are any number of flashes of greatness and strong moments and performances in the mix, and moments that are unsettling, poignant, and thought-provoking, but Oppenheimer is not all that it could have been.
Continue readingDungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
DIRECTOR: John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein
CAST: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Rege-Jean Page, Hugh Grant, Daisy Head
REVIEW:
I went into Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves mostly blind, not really sure of what to expect, and with no particular expectations, and came out pleasantly surprised. While it’s slight compared to epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings (which, in fairness, it’s not trying to compete with), it’s a breezy enjoyable romp combining action, comedy, magic, and as the title suggests, dungeons and dragons.
Continue readingAvatar: The Way of Water (2022)
DIRECTOR: James Cameron
CAST: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Cliff Curtis, Kate Winslet, Edie Falco, Joel David Moore, Dileep Rao, CCH Pounder, Brendan Cowell, Jemaine Clement, James Flatters, Britain Dalton, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Jack Champion, Bailey Bass
REVIEW:
James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi epic Avatar surpassed his own Titanic to seize the “king of the world” title of highest-grossing film of all time, but at the time and possibly even more so in the decade plus since has become—-in spite of, or because of its runaway box office success—-a polarizing film with slavish adherents and others denigrating its narrative as Dances With Wolves In Space with dashes of Pocahontas and Ferngully thrown in for good measure. That it has taken Cameron over a decade to bring a follow up to the screen—-missing the old adage of striking while the iron is hot—-and his lofty stated ambitions to make a total five film series (!), led to some room for doubts even for those wary of betting against Cameron (who has never had a flop on his filmography). Unfortunately, the long-awaited Avatar: The Way of Water is an overlong, overly self-indulgent, narratively unwieldy sequel that despite some admirable qualities and strong moments is too often a slog to get through its bloated runtime.
Continue readingThe Batman (2022)
DIRECTOR: Matt Reeves
CAST: Robert Pattinson, Zoe Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, Andy Serkis, Colin Farrell, John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard
REVIEW:
With the simply-titled The Batman, Matt Reeves (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) has become only the second filmmaker—following Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Dark Knight trilogy and the more recent misfires of Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman and Justice League—to get a live-action Batman movie right. In fact, this might be the most “Batman” of any live-action Batman movie thus far, and like Nolan’s trilogy, it’s a stand-alone reboot doing its own thing unconnected to the DC Expanded Universe. It’s also the darkest, most adult-oriented Batman movie yet—surpassing the seriousness of Nolan’s vision—and an unconventional comic book movie. Essentially a serial killer/murder mystery/detective story with superhero and comic book elements that often resembles David Fincher’s Se7en more than a typical comic book flick, The Batman shows no lightening of the darkness in which onscreen incarnations of its title character are steeped.
Continue readingThe King’s Man (2021)
DIRECTOR: Matthew Vaughn
CAST: Ralph Fiennes, Harris Dickinson, Gemma Arterton, Djimon Hounsou, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Daniel Brühl, Charles Dance, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Tom Hollander, Stanley Tucci
REVIEW:
While The King’s Man is a bit of a redundant movie, it’s at least redundant in a slightly different way: instead of a dime-a-dozen unnecessary sequel, this one is an unnecessary prequel. 2014’s Kingsman was a fun campy romp, but 2017’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle proved that trying to draw a franchise out of it might have been overkill, and The King’s Man, reaching back to WWI to show the “origins” of the titular secret society of gentlemen spies and modern-day knights, has not changed that opinion. With an episodic structure that veers between a campy action/spy romp to a grim WWI war drama and eventually comes back round again, The King’s Man tries to be two clashing things at once and doesn’t fully succeed in any direction. It’s moderately enjoyable, but doesn’t recapture the entertainment value of the original installment.
Continue readingThe Matrix Resurrections (2021)
DIRECTOR: Lana Wachowski
CAST: Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jessica Henwick, Jonathan Groff, Neil Patrick Harris, Jada Pinkett-Smith
REVIEW:
More than a few franchises have overstayed their welcome—Alien, Predator, Terminator—and The Matrix arguably never needed sequels to begin with. The 1999 original movie, while a bit style over substance (though it wasn’t devoid of the latter) and not having aged well in a couple aspects (its overinflated sense of its own leather jacket-clad, sunglasses-wearing coolness included), was a kinetic and hyper-stylized blast. Alas, its lackluster sequels, 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, fell victim to Pirates of the Caribbean Sequel Syndrome, following up a comparatively simple and straightforward original with overly padded sequels getting bogged down in labored convoluted “epic” mythology and taking themselves way too seriously. And now, almost twenty years later, Lana Wachowski (no longer co-directing with her sibling Lily) has brought us The Matrix Resurrections, a movie way past its sell-by date. An uninspired, messy, and often incoherent hodgepodge, undeservedly self-satisfied with its own copious and heavy-handed meta self-referencing, Resurrections is a turgid slog, a movie that’s not only hard to follow, but doesn’t make us care enough to bother. If this was the best the still-involved Wachowski sibling could come up with after almost two decades of developing a continuing story, The Matrix should have stayed dead.
Continue readingJungle Cruise (2021)
DIRECTOR: Jaume Collet-Serra
CAST: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Edgar Ramirez, Paul Giamatti
REVIEW:
Jungle Cruise follows the massively lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and The Haunted Mansion in Disney’s raiding of its properties to stretch a movie out of a theme park ride. To that end, Jungle Cruise is about what you’d expect, a moderately enjoyable campy adventure romp whose modest charms aren’t quite enough to make up for an overlong runtime and derivative plot that leaves no cliche (or movie it can “borrow” from) unearthed. Mostly ignoring the source material apart from a jumping-off point and marketing hook, it borrows pages liberally from The African Queen, The Mummy (the one starring Brendan Fraser, not Tom Cruise), Romancing the Stone, Indiana Jones, and the aforementioned Pirates of the Caribbean, but most of these aren’t flattering comparisons for Jungle Cruise to invite upon itself.
Continue readingEternals (2021)
DIRECTOR: Chloe Zhao
CAST: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani, Barry Keoghan, Brian Tyree Henry, Lia McHugh, Lauren Ridloff, Don Lee, Kit Harrington, Harish Patel
REVIEW:
In its ongoing quest to further expand its cinematic universe and prove there’s still fresh places to go and life left in the franchise post-Infinity War/Endgame, Eternals represents another risky departure by Marvel Studios, but while this worked for, say, Guardians of the Galaxy, this might represent a rare significant misstep by the studio which has seemed a virtual box office King Midas for the last decade plus. While not a complete failure—in fact, it has admirable qualities, though it ends up feeling somewhat less than the sum of its parts—Eternals is plagued with issues, some of which come from trying to fit it, like a square peg in a round hole, into the greater MCU, while others are its own self-contained pacing and narrative problems.
Continue readingDune (2021)
DIRECTOR: Denis Villeneuve
CAST: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgard, David Dastmalchian, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster
REVIEW:
Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel Dune, a futuristic geopolitical allegory that is unabashedly pro eco-radicalism, anti-corporate, and Islamophilic, is such a notoriously dense work that some believed it was unfilmable, even though it had an influence on various more commercialized sci-fi works that came after it, including George Lucas’ Star Wars (Dune takes place on a desert planet, features a scheming emperor, and involves a mystical power called “The Voice”….sound vaguely familiar?). Attempts were made, most prominently David Lynch’s borderline incoherent—and loosely adapted—1984 film, but its garbled narrative and the deviations it took from the source material rankled Dune fans. Later, a 2000 television miniseries adapted the plot more faithfully, but its low budget TV movie quality kept fans waiting for a definitive adaptation and did not fully allay concerns that perhaps Dune just didn’t work as a movie. Denis Villeneuve has tackled the ambitious task of bringing Dune to the screen in big-budget fashion, and while not a completely unqualified success, his version is successful and engaging enough that the biggest thing wrong with it is its subtitle “Part One”. The approximate first half of Herbert’s original novel has been brought to the screen, but with funding for the rest not yet secure, it remains to be seen if Villeneuve will be allowed to finish his work or whether this Dune will remain a half-told story.
Continue readingShang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
DIRECTOR: Destin Daniel Cretton
CAST: Simu Liu, Awkwafina, Tony Leung, Meng’er Zhang, Michelle Yeoh, Ben Kingsley, Florian Munteanu, Benedict Wong
REVIEW:
WARNING: THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN “SPOILERS”
With the Infinity War phase ended, the Marvel Cinematic Universe must now turn its focus toward the next era of its superheroes, including replacing some of its long-running mainstays who’ve left us (Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow) with the next generation. To that end, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is an engaging origin story that manages touches of an epic feel and does things different from what we expect from the Marvel formula and whose first half feels like an old-school martial arts action flick and whose second half feels like a mythological fantasy epic with shades of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Mulan.
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