moviereviews
Bad Boys: Ride or Dieopens with a credit that calls it “A Don Simpson / Jerry Bruckheimer Production,” which is a particularly impressive feat since Don Simpson died in 1996, less than a year after the release of the original Bad Boys. The involvement of a ghostly producer sort of suits this sequel, though, which concerns itself with — of all things! — the possibility of higher planes of spiritual existence, along with numerous scenes where the heroes receive messages from beyond the grave from their long-dead boss. These are not necessarily elements one expects from the third sequel to a Mich...
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The show’s title card simply reads The Acolyte. No mention of Star Wars. And in the lead-up to The Acolyte, Disney and Lucasfilm have emphasized how different this Star Wars show is from all the previous ones on Disney+. It is set 100 years before theprequels, in a time period never explored in live-action before. Instead of linking back to the films through preexisting characters and locations from earlier films or shows, The Acolyte introduces an entirely new cast, exploring a galaxy with no Empire, where the Jedi are in power and the Sith are virtually nonexistent. Where all of the previous...
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The Beach Boys’ story goes back more than 60 years, with nearly 30 albums, dozens of hit singles, and enough ups and downs and family drama to fill several movies. But the documentary The Beach Boys (streaming on Disney+) packs it all into a compact 113 minutes, skimming the surface of the group’s many chapters while never lingering long enough in any one area to give the casual fan much indication as to why they are one of pop music’s most important bands. Not long into the film, co-founder Mike Love says, “We’ve been counted out as a group a half-dozen times.” That’s true, but The Beach Boys...
Ultimate Classic Rock
There is an old saying about prequels: If the material in them had been genuinely important in the first place it would have been part of the original film. By their very nature, prequels are narratively superfluous. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga certainly is — although it also proves quite conclusively that a film can be narratively superfluous, viscerally exciting, imaginatively designed, and sick as hell all at once. For two and a half hours, the movie unfurls the tragic early years of the true hero of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road: Imperator Furiosa. Decades in the making, but spanning just a couple...
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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...
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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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