“Eastwatch” felt like the second season premiere of this all-too-short penultimate season of Game of Thrones. There were so many moving pieces and ground covered to set up the final two episodes that the whiplash left me hazy on the details. “Wait, so after Dany’s big victory, they want to…
“The Spoils of War” refers to the ongoing conflict in Westeros but also to what fans got in the shortest episode Game of Thrones has yet aired. But runtimes are deceptive and the episode feels plenty full, with two heavy-hitting sequences anchoring it: the Stark family reunion at Winterfell as…
In an earlier season, the build-up to the meeting of “ice and fire” as the red priestess Melisandre describes the meeting of Daenerys Targaryen, exiled Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, and Jon Snow, the bastard King in the North. But I wonder if, in the eagerness to unspool the endgame,…
There were several more war councils and strategy meetings in”Stormborn,” the second episode of Game of Thrones‘ abbreviated and penultimate seventh season. But unlike the premiere, which acted as an extended prologue, there was a significant amount of forward momentum to the plotting and a big action scene to signal…
Box office is down at theaters this summer amidst tired franchise offerings. But on Sundays, at the same 9 p.m. hour, TV is proving how it has caught up to cinema. On one hand, there’s Twin Peaks, an auteur’s acid trip courtesy of David Lynch, and at 10 episodes into his…
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…