The Fast and Furious films are much like the cars they’re about. The series is a machine that’s had parts interchanged and souped up over the years. The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment in the most improbable saga in blockbuster cinema, shows the first signs of wear and tear.…
Kong: Skull Island is a movie for the child and inner geek inside us all. Rife with giant monster fights and classic movie references, this King Kong-by-way-of-Apocalypse-Now reboot has more on its mind than just spectacle but not quite the bandwidth to handle it. Though it’s hampered by its own preoccupations…
How many times are the third installments of trilogies the best? Going by the X-Men franchise at this point, which yielded X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Apocalypse as abysmal trilogy cappers, never. But Wolverine, embodied by Hugh Jackman now in nine films since his 1999 casting in X-Men has…
From the mind of writer/director Jordan Peele, best known as part of the Key & Peele sketch comedy show that wrapped up its five season run on Comedy Central last year, comes Get Out, a horror movie sucks you in with its simple story laced with genre awareness and reverence. The…
Sequel escalation never felt so good as it does in John Wick: Chapter 2. It elevates everything that made the 2014 original so great: the worldbuilding, the fight choreography, the lighting and imagery, the genre throwbacks, and Keanu Reeves’ character tailor-made for the actor’s skills. After taking his revenge for the…
So you ordered a chair. It’s a beautiful chair, best chair you’ve ever seen, will show up all the other lame chairs in your apartment. It will really tie the room together, is what I’m saying. So you order the chair from IKEA, that’s a trusted retailer right? Awesome, your…
The rise of a mutant god means the stakes have never been higher for the X-Men and yet, this sixth entry in the series is the most vacuous and without consequence of the franchise. As Marvel innovates within its model and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice tried (and failed, admittedly)…
Captain America: Civil War is as exemplary as any Marvel film about what they can and have achieved. It uses the past 12 films as a huge canvas to paint a personal story. It maintains the insane balancing act of telling, first and foremost, a Captain America story, second an Avengers…
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has all the problems we feared it would. This is Iron Man 2 on steroids. It’s a stepping stone, a get-rich-quick scheme by by a desperate studio Warner Bros. to ape the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Zack Snyder makes a macho-as-hell film that turns the…
First things first, 10 Cloverfield Lane is not a sequel (or prequel, or side-quel) to Cloverfield. The films share some themes and details but they’re all tertiary, evidence of the script’s late conversion into a patented J.J. Abrams Mystery Box. It seems that the shared titles are anthological, akin to…
