Film Releases

To boost their middling viewership, the Oscars may want to introduce Best Original Headshot as a new category. The nominees for the past few months alone would include the sanguinary Violent Night, J-Lo’s Shotgun Wedding, and without question, Keanu Reeves‘ latest martial arts obscenity, the much-anticipated sequel John Wick: Chapter 4. It seems as if filmmakers are catering to an incessant audience desire for gore that centers around bullets, exploding […]

The DC Extended Universe, which will come to a close later this year with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, hasn’t done many things right, but director David F. Sandberg‘s Shazam! is one of the few exceptions. The title character is played by a charming Zachary Levi, and his teenage alter-ego is Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who lives in a Philadelphia foster home. He’s gifted magical, god-like superpowers by an ancient […]

The Scream franchise is now over 25 years old, surpassing in age most of its current target audience. The latest installment, Scream VI, perfectly encapsulates the new generation it is aimed at — fun and entertaining but also soft, mindless, and noncommittal. Though the old formula still works, surprisingly, the cleverness that made Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson‘s original so brilliant is totally slashed off the screen, as the blade […]

It is preposterous that a movie called Cocaine Bear can even exist, but what is even more outrageous is that anyone could turn the concept of a bear on a coke binge into exquisite cinematic entertainment. Leave it to Elizabeth Banks, whose signature dark humor is on full, majestic display in this movie about a wild animal that ingests cocaine and goes on a rampage. The movie may be predictable […]

The Marvel Cinematic Universe enters a new decade with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. For those not keeping track at home, this film is the first in Marvel’s all-important Phase 5, the third in the Ant-Man franchise, and the 30th in the MCU. You cannot fully fault the filmmakers for failing to find compelling narratives for 30+ movies that explore variations on the same themes, more or less, as audiences […]

Only Steven Soderbergh could make a movie about a bunch of strippers seem poetic, as he did with 2012’s Magic Mike. But, much like his underwhelming sequels to the spectacular Ocean’s Eleven, the third lap dance in his latest franchise, aptly titled Magic Mike’s Last Dance, demonstrates that showbiz persistently ignores at its own peril the old adage that discretion is the better part of valor. Channing Tatum returns as […]

Artists who catch lightning in a bottle early in their careers frequently fail to live up to their promised potential. This was certainly the case of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, whose stunning success with The Sixth Sense back in 1999 yielded a couple of smaller hits like Unbreakable and Signs before leading to a string of underperformers including Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth. […]