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‘MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON’ A Delightful and Subtly Profound Mediation on Life (As a Shell)

Compared to What?

In 2010, the world met Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a tiny anthropomorphic shell fitted with even tinier pink shoes, a sole googly eye, and a can-do attitude. The short film featuring Marcel was an endearing mockumentary about the trials and tribulations of a single shell’s life. The eponymous character did things like drag a piece of lint around on a hair like a dog while saying, “A lint is a shell’s best friend.” The short garnered 11-million views on YouTube and a legitimate cult following. The enthusiastic shell with many a quotable one-liner became a household name and the original short eventually begat a few short sequels, a couple spin-off storybooks, and, well over a decade later, an actual movie.  Read More

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Soulless Video Game Adaptation ‘UNCHARTED’ A Cash Grab With Zero Charm

A black hole of charm, Sony’s Uncharted is the opposite of inspired. Everything about this lazy, expensive, haphazard adaptation of the popular Playstation exclusive reeks of assembly-line blockbuster manufacturing. For a wannabe franchise-launching starting block, one that clocks in with an aggressive $120 million dollar budget, Uncharted feels little more than a hack pastiche of adventure movie tropes, airlifted in from better treasure hunter films and spackled with a coat of snide Mark Wahlberg one-liners. It’s painful by virtue of just how adamantly risk-averse and paint-by-numbers just about everything on screen ends up being. Read More

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‘MOONFALL’ A Crash Course on Big Dumb Havoc Wreaking

The master of disaster is back to ruin the world again with Moonfall, a shamelessly bonkers sci-fi disaster movie where the moon is suddenly on a collision course with earth. A select few suspect aliens are involved. Following a string of disappointments, director Roland Emmerich’s latest is a bit of a return to form, or at least whatever form best suits Emmerich. Moonfall is an uncompromisingly ridiculous disaster epic where the scale is as massive as the plot-holes and the human element is consistently overshadowed by destruction special effects. It’s big, it’s loud, it’s dumb, and by the time the whole thing takes shape, it’s almost too much fun to deny its simple pleasures. Almost. Read More

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‘SCREAM’ Takes a Stab at “Requels” with Deadly Precision 

Scream is back. And with a new Ghostface (or two) comes a biting deconstruction of not just the long-standing slasher franchise, or the nature of “requels” (a term coined in this very film), or the horror genre in general, but the movie industry writ large. Many films of recent years have tried to capture the imagination of audiences by commentating on their own storied legacy – most recently with both The Matrix: Resurrections and Spider-Man: No Way Home – but none have done it with quite as sharp a wit or a curvaceous a blade as the most recent Scream. Tapping into the meta repartee that franchise architect Wes Craven approached the material with from the very get go, this fifth installment of the 90s-born slasher whodunnit is as razor-sharp and bloody glorious as ever. Most importantly, it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.  Read More

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‘RED ROCKET’ is Magic Mike Meets Joe Dirt A.K.A. It’s Glorious

Washed up porn star Mikey Sabre (Simon Rex) arrives by bus back in his hometown of Texas City, Texas. He’s beat up and sans belongings, bruised from some unseen brawl but still so motormouthed you’d think he were riding high on the Colombian marching powder. But Mikey doesn’t have the kind of money to fund such a habit. In fact, he has no money to his name. Which is why he’s in Texas City, Texas. Mikey hasn’t quite come crawling back to his estranged meth-head wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) to rekindle their extinguished flame but he does need to crash on her couch for a bit while he gets his affairs in order. If she’ll let him. Read More

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‘HOUSE OF GUCCI’ A Funnier Than Expected But Tedious Tale of Fashion-Forward Betrayal 

All empires inevitably crumble. But not all with such lack of style. House of Gucci is the story of one such fading empire as treachery, betrayal, and greed drive a wedge between the preeminent Italian family fashion business. That wedge is named Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), a commoner from a trucking family who worms her way into the Gucci family after capturing the attention and affection of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) at a nightclub. A lawyer by trade, Maurizio is not wrapped up with the family business but his romance with Patrizia takes foot and her business aspirations grow so too does his involvement in the Gucci brand’s future. All sense of familial loyalty is thrown by the wayside as ambition turns to avarice and blood becomes the new family currency. Read More

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The Ghosts of Showbiz Past Haunt ‘LAST NIGHT IN SOHO’

Dashed dreams and grubby hands reveal themselves to be the stuff of Edgar Wright’s nightmares in the stylish throwback Last Night in Soho. A ghostly haunter with one foot in the modern zeitgeist and one squarely in raging 1960’s London, Wright’s first foray into the horror grapples between serious social horrors and pure genre thrills, delivering a thoroughly entertaining slice of Giallo exploitation that warns of the temptation of nostalgia. Read More

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Vile Men Are Always the Heroes of Their Own Story in Medieval Court Drama ‘THE LAST DUEL’

The Middle Ages, a vast period of cultural and intellectual bankruptcy. A thousand years of decline spent spilling blood in the soil over God, king, and country. The hoi polloi, excited by the rage of religious fervor, cheered for bread and circus and no circus promised more drama than a duel to the death. This is where we find ourselves at the start of Ridley Scott’s latest sword and sandal epic, The Last Duel, with two men, each believing God and the truth is by their side, equipping plates of armor and squeezing into chainmail, squires readying their steads, prepared to square off in an arena until one man claims the other’s last breath. All to prove that their truth is the truth. There’s no better way to prove veracity than by bloodletting – under God’s benevolent eye. Read More

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A Gambling Oscar Isaac Bets on Salvation in Stoic Drama ‘THE CARD COUNTER’

Nihilism pairs naturally with playing cards semi-professionally. Those hitting the poker circuit know this. The most improbable river (the fifth card in a game of Texas Hold ‘em) can render the best hand and best player a loser in the wings, drawing dead. They just don’t know it yet. It seems that odds are meaningless against the tides of fate. Cold, calculating, and reductive, the best poker players are those who remove the emotional element entirely, stoic ice statues playing odds, preying on the faintest whiff of weakness. The Card Counter, the newest film from auteur Paul Schrader (First Reformed) is a nihilistic meditation on the impossibility of redemption, as a broken military man turned gifted gambler wrestles with his demons around a card table. Read More

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Icy Free Solo Doc ‘THE ALPINIST’ Makes Alex Honnold Look Like a Moderate Risk-Taker

The crux of Nick Rosen and Peter Mortimer’s (The Dawn Wall) thrilling new climbing documentary The Alpinist is self-described “true dirtbag” Marc-André Leclerc. Leclerc, a 23-year old Canadian alpine free solo enthusiast-turned-pioneer, is in many ways the antithesis of many modern climbers. Seeking fame is not and never has been his purpose, the documentary beginning with Leclerc as more of a mythical easter egg, a whisper within the upper rungs of the climbing community. Much like The Sparks are “your favorite band’s favorite band”, Leclerc is your favorite climbers’ favorite climber. His bonafides are certified early on when climbing rockstar and Free Solo subject Alex Honnold choses Leclerc when asked who in the climbing world impressed him.   Read More