An intriguing premise is the only aspect a film needs to grab attention. That said – and unfortunately, if I may be honest – it’s the names of directors, screenwriters, and especially well-known actors that ultimately become the biggest draw for the general public. Jackpot! truly hits the jackpot by …
Doug Liman is known for kickstarting the Jason Bourne franchise with The Bourne Identity, but perhaps even more for what’s often considered one of the best action films of its decade, Edge of Tomorrow. Unfortunately, since that 2014 release, the filmmaker has been inconsistent with his work, producing reasonably satisfying …
I’ve avoided reading Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us for years now. As an avid reader who is also constantly on social media, the novels of Colleen Hoover have been plastered all over TikTok and Instagram, none with such veracity as It Ends With Us and its sequel, It Begins …
A career woman finds herself unexpectedly pregnant? Snore. Without knowing who the dad is? Seen it. But pregnant with twins, by each of her suitors? Outstanding. Without hyperbole, this is the greatest concept for a romantic comedy in the history of time. Bad Newz then surpasses the excellence of its …
Marvel ended Phase 3 of its cinematic universe in 2019 on a high with Spiderman: Far From Home and promised that Phase 4 would bring new stories along with new heroes. Fans were excited for the new era. However, things didn’t turn out to be as good as fans wanted. …
Fairy tales have always dealt with heavy topics. Children still need to know about complex issues, and sometimes, couching those issues in a fantastical world can make them easier to understand. That remains true for adults. High fantasy stories can cause us to engage with topics that we might otherwise …
An uninspired plot and several phoned in performances makes Borderlands a huge misfire. Adapting a story from one medium to another is tough. Whether the source material is a novel or a comic or a twitter thread or a game, there are many choices that need to made because while …
Musical biopics consistently earn a reputation as a simple path to awards seasons and other accolades. In recent years, there have been examples in Bohemian Rapsody, Maestro, Elvis, and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, among others. It is a genre that has been repeating itself constantly and delivering mediocre …
This inspired by true events biopic is crowd-pleasing cinema at its best. An ordinary Joe goes toe to toe with heartless billionaires, conniving moneylenders and unfair bureaucracy all in an attempt to make life better and easier for people like him. Will he succeed?? The set-up answers its own question, …
In 2020, director Lee Isaac Chung made Minari, the story of an immigrant family in Arkansas with dialogue almost entirely in Korean. An extremely insulting debate sprang up about whether the movie was American, only possible because the immigrants weren’t white and not speaking English. Mr. Chung has now responded …
Scarlett Johansson co-produced this movie as a vehicle for herself, which should automatically mean it’s worth watching. She has largely focused her career on how someone with a body like hers navigates the world, but here, her body is not the center of attention. Instead it’s her mind, specifically her …
For fans of horror films, at times, it feels like the classic monster tropes are done to death. Made famous in Hollywood thanks to the classic Universal films, vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, and The Mummy have been produced and reproduced by almost every studio. You would think that over the …
Not since 1999’s The Blair Witch Project has a horror campaign been quite as effective as the one Neon have instigated for Oswald Perkins’ horror Longlegs. The campaign that tore the internet apart at the turn of the millennium was based on the idea that the titular Blair Witch was …
Not much is known about Josef Mysliveček – the 18th-century composer at the center of writer and director Petr Václav’s lavish historical biopic The Bohemian – in the English-speaking musical world. It is known he was on good terms with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the two composers vied for recognition …
In 2022, audiences were introduced to the world of the X trilogy with X and its prequel Pearl, both of which were produced and filmed at a record time and managed to come out in the same year. Only two years later, the working relationship between A24, director Ti West, …
There is a milestone in every cinephile’s journey that turns the table from a hobby to an obsession. A specific film ignites a fire within the individual, leading to an almost unexplainable passion. One of the world’s biggest cinephiles, the legendary director Martin Scorsese, not only invested in restorations but …
It is always, always a delight to see a movie that should not exist. Whether the artistic ambition is implausible or the plot is incredible, it’s always a pleasure to see the impossible, especially when it’s so determined to entertain us. Hundreds of Beavers is a mixed-media (part live-action, part …
To this day, Apollo 11’s successful landing on the moon is one of humanity’s greatest feats – an inspiring amalgamation of ingenuity, ambition, and cooperation. Fly Me to the Moon, to this critic’s knowledge, is the first to use this mission for a romantic comedy setting. It’s certainly an unorthodox …
It’s been apparent to the discerning student of world cinema for a little while now that Indian movies are about to burst into the Western mainstream. (Modesty be damned, I mentioned this on my personal blog at the end of last year.) The ground-breaking Oscar for RRR was the beginning …
M. Night Shyamalan’s career is one of the most divisive I’ve seen in the past few decades. While he directed earlier films, such as Praying with Anger and Wide Awake, his horror film The Sixth Sense put him on the map with a twist that people still talk about today. …