MovieReviews
The Jinxcould have been created to prove the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. It told the story of Robert Durst, the black sheep of an obscenely wealthy New York real estate dynasty, who police connected to the mysterious disappearances or deaths of three different people: His first wife Kathy, his best friend Susan Berman, and his neighbor, Morris Black. Durst had even been tried for Black’s murder; he managed to beat the charge despite acknowledging, in open court, that he had chopped up the neighbor’s body in order to cover up what he had done (in self-defense, he claimed). Th...
ScreenCrush
Movie Rule #28: Never directly reference a movie that is superior to the one we are watching. Dev Patel’s disappointing directorial debut Monkey Man breaks this rule in a very distracting way. In an early scene, the film’s unnamed hero, known only as “Kid” (played by Patel himself), talks his way into the showroom of a black market arms dealer. “You like John Wick?” the salesman smirks as he shows off a handgun like the one Keanu Reeves wields onscreen. Most viewers could have made the comparison to John Wick themselves without the explicit shoutout. Both Wick and Monkey Man are bloody action ...
ScreenCrush
For the last week, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a quote from Roger Ebert’s review of the 2003 action film Timeline. Introducing the press screening that Ebert attended, Timeline director Richard Donner boasted how his film featured far more practical effects than you’d assume. The fireballs flung around its medieval battlefields were real, Donner explained, not computer-generated. “The problem,” according to Ebert, “is … it’s not whether we’re watching real fireballs or fake fireballs but whether we care about the fireballs at all.” I can’t think of a more succinct description of...
ScreenCrush
Viewed today on Disney+, the ’90s X-Men animated series doesn’t look like much. The animation, which was pretty good by the standards of its era, appears rough and crude through 2024 eyes. The material is pretty familiar these days, too, thanks to seven live-action X-Men, and who knows how many other Marvel films and series. I learned this lesson first-hand; I tried showing X-Men: The Animated Series to my kids a few months ago after they started showing more interest in superheroes. They met the first episode with a shrug and asked to watch something else. X-Men ’97, the new sequel series to ...
ScreenCrush
God bless Dan Aykroyd. He has waited a long time to play a major role in another Ghostbusters movie, and when he finally got the chance, he made the most of it. This man lives to spout nonsense ghost-catching jargon — and whenever he does it in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, he can barely keep a smile off his face. The movie around him is a mess at the best of times and a disaster at the worst, but Aykroyd always looks like he’s having fun, even if no one else is. There are about a million different things crammed into Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and sadly Aykroyd’s deeply felt performance is t...
ScreenCrush
About five minutes into the new remake of Road House, its hero comes close to killing himself by deliberately parking his car on some train tracks as a locomotive comes barreling through an intersection. At the last minute he changes his mind. The hero survives by the thinnest of margins; so thin, in fact, that the back of his beater gets clipped and totaled by the train. There may be a metaphor in there somewhere. A remake of Road House — any remake of Road House — should be a train wreck. If I had been asked “What’s the best way to remake Road House?” a few years ago, my response would have ...
ScreenCrush
“Whether [Denis] Villeneuve gets to make Part Two depends largely Part One’s success. Call me a cynic, but I suspect that means we’ll never see this story finished. Either way, I would rather have one magnificent portion than a frenzied, nonsensical whole.” Those were the concluding words of one dumb film critic’s rapturous review of Villeneuve’s Dune. (The dumb film critic was, uh, me.) Back then, I was glad Villeneuve chose to adapt only the first half of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel, even if it meant I might never see the conclusion of the story. That first half was so beautiful and sm...
ScreenCrush
The first time Marvel’s logo played on the big screen, it wasn’t technically on a Marvel film. Those now-ubiquitous white-on-red letters emerging from the flipping pages of a comic made their cinematic debut in front of 2002’s Spider-Man, produced and distributed by Sony. When Marvel started their own studio a few years later, they updated the logo for their own use; instead of a comic, the word “Marvel” gradually materialized out of scenes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and shots of stars like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. Studios like Sony who license Marvel characters can’t use th...
ScreenCrush
The list of locations visited by the characters in Argyllereads like the ultimate luxury vacation: Greece, London, Hong Kong, French wine country. As well it should; it is an unwritten rule of spy movies like Argylle that the heroes must trot the globe while saving it. But when James Bond travels the world, the cast and the crew usually go with him to those real places. If he jumps off a mountain in Austria, they go to the Alps to shoot it. When you watch The Spy You Love Me, you get glimpses of Egypt and Sardinia in between the bad puns and karate chops. That travelogue component, that taste ...
ScreenCrush
Those active in a certain sector of American liberalism will have quickly become familiar with the name Pete Souza over the last few years. The former official photographer for the Obama White House has made quite a name for himself by posting pictures of the 44th president with captions that draw a sharp contrast between his behavior and that of his successor — they’ve been a kind of catnip for the #resistance.Seasoned documentarian Dawn Porter has taken it upon herself to tell Souza’s story, or rather allowing Souza to tell his own story — Porter’s presence as the director of the film is str...
uInterview.com
閲覧を続けるには、ノアドット株式会社が「プライバシーポリシー」に定める「アクセスデータ」を取得することを含む「nor.利用規約」に同意する必要があります。
「これは何?」という方はこちら