*This post will contain spoilers for A Quiet Place* The premise of A Quiet Place sounds like something a screenwriting professor would come up with as a way of explaining the principle of “show, don’t tell.” If you want audiences to understand how the world of your film works, the teacher would say, you shouldn’t have a…
Is Ready Player One a dark story about a society so obsessed with wallowing in nostalgia and wasting time on an online game that it has no issue letting the real world crumble? Or is it a loving ode to geekdom and a celebration of how nostalgia and online worlds can bring people together and serve as a…
Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane is one of those movies that completely enraptures you during its running time, only to leave you spending the rest of the night poking holes in the plot and realizing that none of it seems to make that much sense. Looking back on the film — which I really enjoyed, by the way —…
I went into Kingsman: The Golden Circle with incredibly low expectations thanks to the critical thrashing it received, but I ended up having a fun time at the theater. I honestly don’t see how it’s that much of a drop from the first one – well, except for two things about it that really bothered me. *WARNING:…
Spider-Man: Homecoming is pretty clearly the best movie featuring the character since at least 2004’s Spider-Man 2, and it’s another fine addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The film is comfortable keeping its stakes low, with a story that truly is about a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and that does not conclude with some world-ending battle. I absolutely can’t wait…
I loved Edgar Wright’s newest film Baby Driver, yet a part of me was disappointed in its relative simplicity compared to the rest of the director’s filmography. This car chase musical is dazzling and energetic, but it’s also the first Wright work that exercises style over substance, and unlike his four previous movies, I struggle to identify…
After watching Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad last year, I left the theater in a state of bewilderment to be sure, but I can’t say that I was overly disappointed. After all, I don’t have much of a personal connection to the DC comic book characters, nor was I particularly invested in the success of a DC cinematic…
It was always going to be difficult for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 to meet my expectations, considering how highly I still regard the first film. It remains my favorite entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a movie with lovable characters, thrilling setpieces, great humor, and endless rewatchability. Vol 2., indeed, did not quite live up to all…
The most common criticism being leveled at Blair Witch this weekend is that it’s a lazy retread of the original, and that is completely baffling to me because I had the exact opposite problem with it. I legitimately do not understand how this movie fits in to the established Blair Witch mythology, and it does not at all feel like the…
Don’t Breathe is one of the finest horror films I have seen in my adult life. Virtually every element of it worked for me; it’s tense as hell, the scares are unique, and it utilizes silence effectively to have us all freaking out in our seats even when nothing is really happening. There’s not much else I…
I can’t recall the last time I felt as disappointed with the ending of a movie as Lights Out. For the first 70 minutes, I was enjoying a thoroughly entertaining and scary little film with likable characters and inventive sequences, albeit one with some rough dialogue and plot contrivances. The central metaphor about mental illness and depression was interesting,…
The original Purge film is perhaps the worst execution of an interesting premise that I have seen. Here we have a fictional universe in which for one day a year, all crime is made legal for 12 hours, a fascinating concept that the audience immediately wants to explore. Yet in the 2013 original, we are confined to one…
