This movie is cinematic depression. Not that it makes the viewer feel hopeless, worthless and low in energy. But what the audience watches is a hopeless, worthless and low energy movie.
Putting aside Brandon Lee's ability to stir..feelings..in generations of teenage Goth girls who have discovered the 1994 movie every week since it came out, The Crow as a media property has a simple formula. It is a tale of vengeance, redemption and the supernatural told in a style that drips with atmosphere.
I liked it. This is a well-made popcorn horror movie. It is not interested in big ideas. It's about tension. Alien was a movie about skilled labour in a claustrophobic jump scare-filled small space with a monster. Aliens brings in corporatism, adds a larger space and more monsters. Prometheus is about the elite, their ideas and what it means to not be one of them in David's case. Set between Alien and Aliens, Alien Romulus is about the working poor and their life that is already horrific.
It isn't that this movie is terrible, it's that it gets boring. The Borderlands series is darkly irreverent. It's gory in a visceral "ewwwhhh" and laugh way. It's funny in a "well this will hurt" way. The movie has none of that. It's Borderlands with the life rung out of it.
Yes it has the colourful character design, eater eggs and the 1080p CGI makes Pandora look like the dusty trash pile it is.
An unfortunate miss. It looks too sharp in that Doctor Who/British children's TV way. The cast doesn't gel and it lacks the dark undertones of the original movie. The absence of delight and absurdity in humour drags the production down. Some of the jokes land. But this is a show about burglars with a cosmic map of time and space on the run from order and chaos. The ambition on screen here isn't enough.
Bruce Timm's Batman Caped Crusader is an iteration on the Dark Deco style of his work on Batman: The Animated Series. This like that show has a villain/monster of the week format but unlike that show Gotham itself is not a character. Bruce Wayne is good, but Hamish Linklater hasn't found Batman's menace yet.
The villains are..okay. I enjoyed the Boris Karloff spin on Clayface. Christina Ricci's Catwoman is an entertaining spend-thrift kleptomaniac.
Better than the ill thought out slop Marvel has been releasing but not close to the heights of the finest entries. There is no story to spoil and the villain is underwhelming. The only spoilers you need to beware of are cameos and pop culture jokes. This is a fan service movie on steroids for long-time fans. It builds on Deadpool 2's finale and then tucks itself into the Disney+ era of Marvel.
The good news is dumb big budget disaster movies are back. The bad news is the same as the good news. Twisters has a lot in common with the 1996 original. The plot is nonsense, the characters are paper thin and you'll never think about the movie again after seeing it.
Unlike the Jan de Bont movie with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton the leads here have no chemistry. Something I put on Daisy-Edgar Jones as Glen Powell had chemistry with several co-leads in past films.
With the trashed audience scores you'd be forgiven for thinking something has changed with The Boys. But the only thing that has changed is the show runner trying to distance himself from a part of his audience for his career.
Here's a Stan Edgar moment. No one wearing a red hat can damage that career. However, those in the entertainment industry unsophisticated enough to believe the show runner wrote this show for "
This is one of the better fiction series currently airing. A reworking of the novel of the same name, and drawing from Anne Rice's body of work, a wonderful sense of unease flows from the screen. This isn't a show that tries to be clever, it is clever. It can also be funny, dreadful, supernatural and humane.
The dialogue crackles as an older Daniel Molloy, his body failing him, trades venomous barbs with art world magnate Louis de Pointe du Lac.
This is a kids show. The plot nor the characters have any sophistication and the story operates on a level just above a 90s television sitcom. Instead of twin sisters separated at birth and reunited as teenagers it's twin sisters separated as children and reconciled in their early twenties. Neither set of reunited siblings can wield a lightsaber so it's not that far away from the TV show Sister, Sister. It's Sister, Sister: A Star Wars Young Adult series.
A stunt show movie as flimsy as an empty bucket of popcorn but it has a summer romantic comedy charm. It's very early 2000s in its Hollywood commentary. That kills the momentum after the first hour as it is not presented well enough to hold interest.
For what the producers were looking to do it needed action, humor and adventure. It has plenty of action, with bone-crunching stunt work. Gosling and Blunt deliver humour with skill, but there's a large sucking void on screen where adventure should be.
What do you want and how much do you want it? That's the question faced by the horrified guests on "Night Owls with Jack Delroy." Delroy (David Dastmalchian) has everything a successful talk show host needs. He's articulate, comfortable bantering with the audience and has a comfortable rapport with his celebrity guests. He does the shallow opening monologue, makes jokes at the expense of the band leader/sidekick, gets into the audience, and conducts interviews.
The spaghetti western turns post-apocalyptic in this high-budget production of a gritty tale. We have cringe-worthy but endearing optimists. Antiheroes whose cruelty disfigures them more on the inside than radiation has on the outside. Striving zealots of gleaming order and anarchic savages who'll wipe themselves on the drapes. And that's just the first two episodes.
The show's burnt out 2150s are mirrored by an alternate 1950s. Bing Crosby croons as one of our protagonists walks across endless scorched dust.
This is the dumbest movie in a franchise that includes the brainless Godzilla: King of The Monsters. Kaiju fights are awesome. Everybody knows this. Even if you don't know it you do. But this movie is so dumbly dense it's a Saturday morning cartoon playing in the heart of a neutron star.
When we meet Kong, we see how clever he is. The Hollow Earth is a lurid and dangerous Playstation 2 CGI environment.
Road House is stupid and enjoyable. I'd watch a sequel. When we first see a ripped Jake Gyllenhaal his character comes across as one of life's losers. Why this man, Elwood Dalton, with his warrior's physique is so unmoored from existence is the mystery in the early part of the film.
He is not doing well though in body and attitude he appears solid. His life is squalid, his choices are careless, and we see he's in the grip of suicidal ideation.
This is a streaming movie. It didn't start out as a streaming movie but that's what made it to the screen. While I enjoyed its prequel, Afterlife, this doesn't build on its strengths.
If there is a third movie, I fear the performance of this movie may not justify that expense, the cast needs to return to the teenage team of Phoebe, Trevor, Podcast, and Lucky. During the earlier movie, teens were in over their heads and solved problems using grit and Zoomer technology.
Is this an exciting movie to see on a cinema screen? Yes. Is the movie and the actors' performances overhyped? Also yes. Dune Part 2 is exactly what you need from the second half of a story but it feels less...grand.
The universe building was in the first movie and besides a glance at Kaitian, home of the Emperor, and a brief visit to the monochrome seat of Harkonnen power, Gedi Prime, this movie focuses on life in the desert.
A luscious-looking adaptation of Clavell's 1975 novel FX's Shōgun is a worthwhile watch. You can tell there's money on the screen when the doomed ship Erasmus emerges from the fog. It looks like an oil on canvas painting. While the Samurai tropes are long exhausted, 17th century Japan at this scale may be an alien world to a Western audience. It feels substantial when you see it roll out in front of you and there is detail everywhere you turn your eyes.