‘BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER’ Celebrates A Life Through the Largess of the Blockbuster

November 8, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Chadwick Boseman, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong'o, Ryan Coogler, Tenoch Huerta 1 Comment

Long Live the King

Marvel Studios don’t really make movies so much as installments. Each new entry to their ever expanding stable of (increasingly disconnected) films feels like little more than a stepping stone towards more. The next sequel. The next phase. The next saga. There’s never a minute to rest. And even when there is a rare moment of quiet, that beat becomes just another opportunity for an incoming quip or a chance to tease the space with allusions to some eggy comic book lore (never forget Thor in the sauna). What a breathe of fresh air then Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is actually a real movie unto itself; an individual story about legacy and loss, complicated by real life grief and the guilt of carrying on. Read More

Wanna-Be Antihero ‘BLACK ADAM’ A Slave to Formula

October 20, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Adam Sztykiel, Aldis Hodge, Black Adam, C. C. Beck, Dwayne Johnson, Jaume Collet-Serra, Mohammed Amer, Noah Centineo, Otto Binder, Pierce Brosnan, Rory Haines, Sarah Shahi, Sohrab Noshirvani, The Rock, Viola Davis 1 Comment

Between A Rock and a Hard Place

Heroes don’t kill. Or at least that’s what Black Adam tells us, seemingly having forgotten that arguably this same universe’s most famous hero, Batman, himself was beating criminals to a bloody corpse not five years prior. That Black Adam is predicated on the will-he-won’t-he of Dwayne Johnson choosing good or evil should speak to the level of surprises in store with the DCEU’s latest superhero wank. It is, after all, The Rock we’re talking about here. We know who this man is. Or rather who he always present himself as. We’re hardwired at this point to know what kind of characters he (almost exclusively) plays and which he does not. He’s groomed beyond the point of being hairless. Family-friendly to the point where he’s never had a sexual interest in any movie that I can remember. The man is a walking, talking PR creation. Threateningly non-threatening. Only the clueless or culturally-apathetic will be left to wonder which way this is going to turn out. Spoiler alert, it’s just a matter of time before this ostensible antihero becomes a slave to the reluctant hero formula. Read More

‘HALLOWEEN ENDS’ Simultaneously a Weird and Rote Send-Off to a Killer Icon

October 13, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Andi Matichak, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, Halloween, Halloween Ends, Horror, Jaime Lee Curtis, Out in Theaters, Paul Brad Logan, Reviews, Rohan Campbell 14 Comments

Evil Goes Viral

Even if Halloween Ends is a messy, weird, convoluted, predictable, and only quasi-satisfying conclusion to the 40-plus year Michael Myers saga, you have to give it credit for actually trying something new. For much of director David Gordon Green’s trilogy-capper and alleged conclusion to the franchise (at least for now), Mike Myers is MIA. He’s gone. Not involved. For the vast majority of the film, he exists moreso as the lingering idea of the nature of evil than as an actual hulking killer. Instead the focus is on an entirely new character, Corey (Rohan Campbell), a hapless teen who gets roped into a night of babysitting. One prank gone wrong later, Corey accidents kills his charge. Read More

‘THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN’ Examines the Tragic Hilarity of a Country at War With Itself

October 6, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Barry Keoghan, Ben Davis, Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Kerry Condon, Martin McDonagh, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sheila Flitton, The Banshees of Inisherin Leave a comment

A Very Civil War

The year is 1923. In Inisherin, a small, remote island off the east coast of Ireland, the days are filled with an almost apocalyptic ennui. From across the bitter cold of the Atlantic, the report of gunfire and cannons signal the ongoing Irish Civil War. Ireland’s Civil War came on the heels of their War of Independence from Great Britain. And claimed even more lives. It pit brothers and friends against one another, forcing allies who had fought alongside each other just the year prior against England at each other’s throats. The war was deeply personal and subsequently bitter and bloody. Read More

‘SMILE’ Curses Audience With a Bloody Good Time

September 29, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Horror, Jessie T User, Kal Penn, Kevin Keppy, Kyle Gallner, Laura Hasn't Slept, Out in Theaters, Parker Finn, Reviews, Robin Weigert, Smile, Sosie Bacon 2 Comments

Grin and Bear It

For those who have experienced it, trauma becomes a dormant passenger. Quietly lurking, but always there behind the curtain. A pile of kindling awaiting a match. In Parker Finn’s supernatural-psychological horror movie Smile, trauma manifests as a suicide curse. When a therapist’s patients brutally kills herself in front of her, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) becomes the latest victim in a trauma cycle where a compulsion to commit suicide is passed on like a baton. In the world of Smile, if you watch someone kill themselves in spectacularly horrific fashion, you become doomed to die next.

Mia Goth Has the ‘X’-Factor in Devilish Prequel ‘PEARL’

September 14, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Alistair Sewell, David Corenswet, Mia Goth, Pearl, Tandi Wright, Ti West 4 Comments

X Marks The Spot

Ladies and gentlemen, Mia Goth! In Ti West’s remarkably entertaining prequel to X (his other 2022 slasher), Goth plays a woman desperate to be a star but doomed never to be one. The irony is that Pearl should be the movie that propels Goth herself to proper stardom. She’s simply sensational. Featuring as the titular character, Goth steps back into the shoes of a sex-starved, corn-fed, farm-raised vixen with a predilection for murder by pitchfork. This time, West explores her youth, focusing on how her environs and lovelorn family dynamic transform her into the villain we later meet in X. Read More

‘DON’T WORRY DARLING’ Caught Between Sexy Paranoid Thriller and MAGA Utopia

September 10, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Carey Van Dyke, Chris Pine, Don’t Worry Darling, Gemma Chan, Harry Styles, John Powell, Katie Silberman, Nick Kroll, Olivia Wilde, Shane Van Dyke 1 Comment

Make America Great Again

Don’t Worry Darling reminds me of the controversial John Lennon song “Women is the N***** of the World”. The 1972 single is agitprop at its most blatant, employing the titular racial epithet as a means of offensive, highly-loaded language to unsettle, upset, agitate, and shock the listener into embracing the parallel Lennon and Yoko Ono are drawing. Much like director Olivia Wilde (Booksmart) in her sophomore film which, in keeping with the art of exploitation, uses the provocative images of women self harming, receiving electro-shock therapy, and just generally being told they’re being crazy. The meaning of Lennon’s homology is lost on none who listen, equating worldwide sexism with American racism, challenging the global problem of subjugation and control with regards to gender politics. It’s a demanding song, and hard to love for many reasons, but it sticks with you. The problem with Don’t Worry Darling is that at some point in the midst of the film, shock turns to shlock. The challenging Lennon refrain fades, replaced, almost without any explanation, with the more familiar ballad of Beyoncé’s girl power anthem “Run the World”. Read More

‘BARBARIAN’ Is Part ‘DON’T BREATHE’, Part ‘WRONG TURN’ and it Rules

September 7, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Barbarian, Georgina Campbell, Horror, Reviews, Zach Cregger 3 Comments

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Between 2016’s Don’t Breathe and Barbarian, there’s an emergent sub-genre of horror: Detroit Dystopia. Both films put the urban wreckage of the city’s broken ecosystem under the spotlight to set the scene for unspeakable horrors. Barbarian, if not directly inspired by Fede Alvarez’s 2016 horror hit, shares a lot of the same DNA and influences. Both take place in Detroit’s most rundown neighborhoods – an almost post-civilization shadowland marked by abandoned, graffiti-stained houses, a lack of discernible social services, and the roving few who’ve never left. In the ruin of a once flourishing industrial neighborhood lurks a gaping hole. And in that absence sadism festers. Their tunnels run deep. Read More

‘THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING’ and the Problem of Story Telling as Storytelling

August 23, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged George Miller, Idris Elba, Reviews, Three Thousand Years of Longing, Tilda Swinton 1 Comment

All You Need Is Love

First and foremost, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a story about stories. The history of stories, the way in which we tell stories, and the generational impact of those stories. How stories make us feel, make us yearn, make us swoon, make us fundamentally who we are. How stories become passed down from generation to generation and find themselves colored by those telling them. Where is the intersection of truth and stories? And how much can we expect our narrators to be bastions of truth? Further, the film probes how the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are become self-fulfilling prophecies. Essentially – how autobiography can trap their tellers, ensnaring them within a cycle of lying about who or what they truly are. It’s a shame then that the least successful aspect of this particular yarn is the way that it unspools its story. Read More

‘BEAST’ a Shaggy Summer Slasher With Sharp Claws

August 18, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Baltasar Kormákur, Beast, Idris Elba, Iyana Halley, Leah Jeffries, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Ryan Engle., Sharlto Copley 1 Comment

Be Prepared

Idris Elba is Dr. Nate Samuels, a man visiting his late wife’s African homeland with his two teenage daughters in the predictable, playful creature feature Beast. The Savannah-set B-movie from director Baltasar Kormákur (Everest, 2 Guns) is a lean, mean summer slasher, all tightly-coiled, knuckle-headed muscle and razor-sharp claws lacking any more brain cells than absolutely required. A vengeful lion hunting humans for sport attacks the good doctor, his daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries), and their anti-poacher family friend Martin (Sharlto Copley) while the group is on safari. They must lean on their wits to outsmart the beast and come out of the bush in one piece.