Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
1994 – a year when hip hop was flourishing, the Internet was a nascent wonder, and the Autobots were still saving the Earth – or something to that effect. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, the seventh installment in the live-action Transformers series, leaps back to this era for yet another round of robot-on-robot rumblings. However, unlike the cool nostalgia of the 90s, the film is a profoundly uninteresting amalgamation of brain-deadening franchise IP and connective brand synergy. Read More
Five years after swinging the doors off the whole superhero multiverse thing, the highly anticipated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse springs into action to deliver an arachnid-sized punch of fresh, inventive, and emotionally compelling spider-story that’s a true eye-popping wonder. Directed with electrifying visual panache by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, our reunion with Miles Morales, Gwen Stacey, and a host of countless other spider-variants across an ever-expanding multiverse elevates the stakes in this second installment, ambitiously pushing the creative and narrative boundaries along the way. Read More
A family reeling from the sudden death of their wife and mother. A creature that feeds on grief and weakness. Crippling fear of the dark. These are well-worn horror movie tropes through and through but they are executed to impressive effect by filmmaker Rob Savage in his first traditional feature, The Boogeyman. Savage takes these overcooked conventions and tosses them in a wicked blender of terror and tension to make for a wicked fright fest that could well fling you out of your seat. Read More
Death has been tamed in the realm of the Fast and the Furious, a universe where mortality is less of a concrete reality and more of a minor inconvenience. Explosions, vehicular disasters, bullets, and even cosmic escapades seem to have lost their lethal touch. Notably, Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner, who we mourned back in 2013, has somehow cheated death’s finality to make posthumous cameos in four subsequent films. It’s an impressive work ethic that redefines the very essence of ‘life after death’. Why die when resurrection is but as plot contrivance away? Read More
It all starts in a hotel room. Hal (Christopher Abbott) orders room service and waits. Enter Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), a whip-smart dominatrix. Qualley, who you may remember from her standout performances in Maid and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, first poses as a lawyer there to “gather information, verify it, and write up a report.” Although it’s all part of a CEO/powerbroker role play, meticulously scripted to the last detail, it’s actually not that far from the truth. This is Sanctuary, a kinky, mentalist dom-sub rom-com, and it’s the stage for Qualley and Abbott’s most intoxicating performances yet. Read More
In the realm of horror, few franchises are as steeped in blood-soaked lore as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. The latest entry, Evil Dead Rise, cleverly distills the iconic universe’s brutal charms while simultaneously stirring in a fresh batch of viscera. It’s a gory, gruesome, gregarious ride that’s more than just a rehashed resurrection; this fifth entry to the franchise is a blood-thirsty demonic rebirth, that’s both reverential and innovative in equal measure. Much like a vinyl record that keeps on spinning, this franchise seemingly has an endless groove of gory goodness. Read More
There’s an entire genre of movies where a grizzled old-timer with a particular set of skills gets entangled with unsuspecting ruffians who mistakenly stick their noses in his business. Sisu, a Nordic import from writer-director Jalmari Helander, distributed in the U.S. by Lionsgate, is exactly that movie. Only a bit better than you’re used to. Helander’s down-and-dirty prospector vs. Nazi actioner has no interest in rewriting the bones of these familiar trappings so much as getting that formula almost perfectly right, in part by setting it in Nazi-occupied Finland in the closing moments of WWII. Focusing on over-the-top physicality and no-holds-barred brutality, Sisu is an ultra-violent exploitation B-movie that caters to its simple strengths at nearly every junction. Read More
Reeling from the death of his iconoclast mother, an emotionally stunted, mentally ill man must traverse to her funeral in Ari Aster’s oft-indescribable dark comedy, Beau is Afraid. Aster frames the journey as if he were Homer himself, making for a melodramatic and depraved comedy of errors turned familial nightmare, stuffed to the brink of bursting with pure orchestrated chaos. Shocking, subversive, and very often hilariously funny, the genre-defying A24 feature stars Joaquin Phoenix as the titular Beau, a man for whom the pressures of the world are quite overwhelming. The film plays like What About Bob as remade by the director of Hereditary, but as an Oedipal fever dream. It’s a lot thematically. It’s a lot structurally. It’s a lot from a performance-perspective. It’s just a lot of movie. And most of it is pretty brilliant. Read More
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, stylized as written, with the director’s name in the title, for reasons unknown, is the kind of movie that feels the needs to define what “covenant” means for its audience. This takes place not in the opening moments, but as a punctuation mark to the whole affair. As if the intended audiences is so unfamiliar with the dictionary that they don’t even understand the definition of a seventh-grade vocab word. And yet would still show up to see a movie called The Covenant. I’m sorry, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.* This fact becomes even more bewildering the more we dig into what this alleged “action-thriller” is actually about and what its apparent intention is. Read More
In a world where the utterly iconic What We Do in the Shadows exists, it’s a real affront to the entire motion picture medium that a hacky, low-brow vampire-farce like Renfield somehow passes muster and makes its way onto our screens. Reanimating the corpse of the Dracula story for this “horror-comedy” – one that’s notably short on both horror and comedy – director Chris McKay (The LEGO Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War) mashes together the lowest common denominator (demon-inator?) of both genres to make something that is almost entirely devoid of charm, joy, and a pulse. Read More