It feels weird to write on this blog again. I have not posted anything here since February of 2019, a time that feels far longer ago than it really was. I was going through some major transitions then, and this blog — for all of my enjoyment of it — is one of several things […]
Director Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel* is a picture whose main character, more so than the plot she’s in, sells the movie. Its titular protagonist is one of the most awesome characters I’ve seen on screen in a while. A futuristic cyborg with a human brain inside a robotic body, she’s powerful, intelligent, daring, and determined […]
Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old is, first and foremost, a technical marvel. The way that he and his team took grainy black and white footage from a century ago and, through the magic of digital technology, turned it into crisp, colorized film is nothing short of astounding and seemingly […]
Writer/Director M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass caps off what has certainly been the strangest cinematic series in recent memory. It began with 2000’s Unbreakable, a respectable drama/thriller whose thoughtful digressions on superheroes as modern mythology proved quite prescient at a time just before Hollywood and pop culture became dominated by comic book movies. While Shyamalan indicated […]
Like a lot of people, I checked out from the Transformers series a while ago. The 2007 original was a decent, if somewhat stupid, action movie; and I admit to sort of liking (or at least not hating) 2009’s Revenge of the Fallen as an alright-if-I-don’t-think-too-much-about-this experience; but I thoroughly hated 2011’s Dark of the […]
Mary Poppins Returns shares something in common with its cinematic competitor Aquaman: both are great looking, great sounding movies with great leads that put big, splashy moments over graceful storytelling. And also like Aquaman, Mary Poppins Returns gets away with it by virtue of being so entertaining. The film is set a generation after […]
Aquaman is a film of pure, unadulterated, enthralling zaniness. It is sprawling, epic, bombastic, vibrant, outlandish, and remarkably energetic. This is a picture that has the gumption to start with a quote by Jules Verne and the wherewithal to give us a finale that combines elements of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, […]
For all intents and purposes, The Mule marks Clint Eastwood’s first time in front of the camera (he also directs) since 2008’s Gran Torino (I am deliberately not counting 2012’s Trouble with the Curve since I don’t think anyone really remembers it and Eastwood wasn’t really the star anyways). After seeing him give a tour-de-force […]
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald feels less like a movie in the normal sense than it does a two-hour exercise in cinematic preambling. Much is done to try to move pieces in place for future installments in this series (we supposedly have three more after this one), but there isn’t much in the way […]
Comic book writer Stan Lee passed away today at the age of 95. Through his work at Marvel Comics, he co-created* such celebrated superheroes and superhero teams as Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Black Panther, Thor, The Avengers, X-Men, and The Fantastic Four, to name a few. His contributions have left an indelible legacy […]
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