1917 is a movie that sucks you into its wake. Beginning in a quiet field with soldiers napping peacefully on a sunny day, the movie quickly plunges you into the horrors of World War I, as director Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty) embeds you with two soldiers Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) who are …
Everything you need to know about Ford v Ferrari is right there in the title. This crowd-pleasing and well-made movie about the Ford racing team's quest to win the 24-hour Le Mans race follows just about every predictable beat you can imagine in a sports movie. But what sets it apart is the magnetic star presences of Matt …
Thanks in part to the ineptitude of the bulk of latter-day "found footage" movies, it is easy to heap derision on Ghostwatch and The Blair Witch Project, two movies that in many ways pioneered the genre. In the latter case, the fact that it became such a phenomenal cultural touchstone in 1999 also meant that it achieved the level …
Continue reading Double Feature: Ghostwatch and The Blair Witch Project
Do yourself a favor: Before strapping yourself in for this Brad Pitt star-vehicle, ignore any of the promotional material surrounding the movie, which hints at some sort of science-fiction action extravaganza that provides cosmic level entertainment. Anyone going in expecting that is bound to be disappointed. Ad Astra stands firmly instead in the tradition of universe …
Ready or Not's premise is as simple as it is devastatingly ludicrous: At every wedding the Le Domas family, an insanely wealthy board-gaming dynastic family, play a simple game at midnight to welcome the newest member of the family. This year it is Grace's (Samara Weaving) turn as the eldest son's bride to blindly draw …
Perhaps nothing shows the monumental shift of how much our world has changed than to remember that it was only a century ago that the world engaged in a brutal and pointless global conflict in which horses, flesh, and steel mounted up against canons, machine guns, and mustard gas. The conflict resulted in such a …
In our cinematic age of uber-franchises dominating theatres across the globe, no two franchises have suffered as much ridicule and fan-rage as the Transformers movie series and the DC Comics Extended Universe (DCEU). The Transformers franchise – based on a 1980s cartoon that was blatantly an extended toy commercial – found its reputation ground into …
Continue reading Bumblebee & Aquaman (Big Screen Double Feature)
Halfway through Neil Armstrong's (Ryan Gosling) Gemini 8 mission – an experiment to see if docking two spacecrafts in orbit is possible – Armstrong runs into a slight hitch. Their spacecraft has overshot the target and can't see the second spacecraft. There is the usual burst of chatter as his pilot and mission control try …
"Maybe it's time to let the old ways die." These are the words of a Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) song, and it encapsulates not just the spirit of this version of A Star is Born, but of all the previous three times this story has been told. However, unlike in 1937, 1954, and 1976, this is …
It's time for me to confess something: For the last few months whenever I just need to zone out I've found myself lulled into the genteel murder mysteries of Midsomer Murders, of which every episode is currently on Netflix. After two dozen episodes (each about 100 minutes long) I've got the formula down pat: there …
Continue reading Big Screen Double-Feature: Searching & The Little Stranger
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