MovieReviews
IFis the sort of prodigious failure that only a very successful filmmaker can create. Only a director with a track record like John Krasinski could convince a studio to bankroll a film this egregiously saccharine and devoid of drama, and only a guy with a ton of pull in Hollywood could to recruit so many A-list stars to appear in it. Krasinski’s last two movies as a writer and director, the first A Quiet Place and its sequel, grossed more than $630 million for Paramount. They returned the favor by funding IF. The title is short for “imaginary friend”; for reasons the film does not explain, the...
ScreenCrush
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apeswas almost a great movie, and you can see the contours of its greatness through the cracks of the good movie that it is, a bit like spotting the buried ruins of the human world beneath the overgrown trees and vines of the film’s ape civilization. This latest Apes — a direct sequel to the previous Planet of the Apes trilogy that also functions as a kind of soft reboot of the concept — starts off slow and takes its time. Instead of the epic planetary battle promised by the title, its scale is intimate; one ape’s personal journey to find his family, and the relati...
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The Fall Guyis a romantic comedy with two love stories, one happening onscreen between an ambitious director and a daring stuntman, and another happening behind the camera between the ambitious director of The Fall Guy and his crew of daring stuntmen. They’re both quite satisfying. Onscreen, Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling have warm, playful chemistry as the director and the stuntman who can’t stop flirting even as the former repeatedly slams the latter into a rock wall over and over. We like watching these two characters work together and we love when they fight in that playful way that in the m...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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 ...
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“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...
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