Considering the unforeseen tragedy that plagued the eagerly awaited Black Panther: Wakanda Forever before the film even went into production, co-writer Ryan Coogler should be commended for actually producing a thrilling and awestruck follow-up without the use of its star, the late and beloved Chadwick Boseman.

A lot of franchises crash and burn spectacularly when they attempt to continue after the death of their star (Just look at the Pink Panther movies after Peter Sellers died), so the direct sequel to 2018's massive hit might not be as memorable or even as successful as its predecessor. But just the mere fact that it's a spectacular technical achievement while it also manages to provide a touchingly taut and intimate exploration of grief and the journey to recovery is a miracle on its own.

The story begins with the inevitable: T'Challah, The Black Panther, the ruler and prote...Read the entire review

Just like Chinatown, the city of Amsterdam in Amsterdam isn't as relevant to the title as what it represents. Chinatown represents an unknown and incomprehensible evil in people, while Amsterdam stands for forces of camaraderie that fight against such incomprehensible evil.

The city is the backdrop for the intimate bond and love between two World War I veterans, the aloof doctor Burt (Christian Bale) and his steadfast best friend Harold (John David Washington), as well as a free spirit of a nurse named Valerie (Margot Robbie, whose grounded performance keeps the character from coming across as a manic pixie dream girl).

Leaving the ugliness and senseless carnage of the war, the trio finds solace in Amsterdam, using the city's name as a signifier of peace and love. The chemistry between the three actors and writer/director David O. Russell's love for his characters makes it a joy...Read the entire review

When Mad Max: Fury Road came out and blew everyone's minds, a lot of critics remarked that director George Miller is a grandpa and that they expected him to make patient and reflective movies now that he's in the twilight of his years. Certainly not the best and craziest action film of recent years that single-handedly revolutionized the genre at a time when such a thing was deemed to be a long shot.

Well, perhaps to appease those expectations, here comes Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing, the existentially introspective movie that critics might have originally expected from an intellectually and emotionally complex grandpa of his ilk.

As amazing and groundbreaking as Everything Everywhere All Once is, its success will not do any favors for the audience's expectations here. In order to piggyback on that lightning in a bottle's success, Three Thousand Years of Longing's dis...Read the entire review

At least this much can be said about NOPE: When it comes to the suspense-heavy and cryptic alien attack on a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere movies, it's better than Signs.

Writer-director Jordan Peele made a name for himself as one of the only, or perhaps the only, filmmaker in contemporary cinema whose marquee name is enough to put butts in seats.

His signature tone of elevated horror works as impeccably constructed and paced straight genre exercises mixed with Rod Serling-esque explorations of dense and complex social issues.

Unlike zeitgeist setting masterworks like Get Out and Us, which gave distinct and unique commentary on race relations and the class system, NOPE is content with just being a thrilling, terrifying, and ultimately fun-filled 1950s B-movie style alien attack flick.

There are some themes floating underneath the surface here and ther...Read the entire review

As much as I loved (almost) every second of Thor: Love and Thunder with the giddiness of a geeky teenager soaked in 1980s pop culture, I can also fully understand why it might have rubbed some MCU fans the wrong way.

The so-called self-aware "MCU humor" that has been bugging a lot of fans lately is in full effect in Taika Waititi's latest Thor epic. After two entries that tried to treat this cheesy character as Shakespearean mythology, Waititi swept in with the terrific Thor: Ragnarok and finally tapped into the goofy 1980s machismo parody potential of the titular Norse god.

Ragnarok almost killed Thor's badass charisma and Love and Thunder rages in with a glorious kaleidoscope of 1980s kitsch to finish the job. This is as close to a rip-roaring ZAZ or Mel Brooks parody of the MCU that just happens to be a part of the real deal.

There have been attempts at delivering...Read the entire review

Some of the best war films depict how the lives of those who are not directly engaged in an armed conflict and the politics surrounding it, the innocents who just want to live their day-to-day lives, are shattered as they are forced to harden faster than any semblance of hope can reach them. Children are some of the most resilient amongst us to pain and suffering brought on by war, as witnessed by the joy in Ukrainian refugee children's eyes upon being given something as simple as a cheap toy.

Louis Malle's masterpiece Au Revoir Les Enfants is still one of the most heartbreaking and devastating films about the holocaust, even though it doesn't show a single frame of the concentration camps or World War II for that matter. The film takes place entirely in a boarding school and depicts the friendship between a Christian kid and a Jewish student who's hiding his identity.

As the te...Read the entire review

I don't understand why the Jurassic World franchise (Formerly known as the Jurassic Park franchise) has a consistent allergy to letting its full blockbuster schlock flag fly but offering an installment that fully takes place in a world where dinosaurs and humans battle it out.

After the third act edging of the San Diego T-Rex attack in The Lost World all the way back in 1997, the fans were promised the move towards seeing all kinds of prehistoric reptiles wreaking havoc on the city streets and on locations that weren't yet another secluded island in South America.

Yet Jurassic Park III delivered just that: More of the same. After the stupendous and tone-deaf decision to have the dinosaurs released to the world at the end of the last Jurassic World entry, the Fallen Kingdom, some teaser shots before that movie ended promised yet again that the franchise was finally going...Read the entire review

It's almost like Alex Garland made Men knowing it would be released two weeks after the news about Roe v Wade being overturned. It's a furious and pointed art-house horror about the male obsession with possessing women's minds, bodies, and souls. Its inherent terror and gruesome fervor should provide the perfect visceral release for those who have spent the last two weeks perpetually pissed off.

Garland doesn't really offer a traditional script with Men, but more of a premise that's expanded through its strict adherence to the multiple allegories about gender relations that Garland expresses through a gradually rising cinematic intensity, culminating in a fever pitch of anxiety and terror. It's about a woman named Harper (Jessie Buckley) who rents a quaint and quiet house in a quaint and quiet small English town in order to get away from a traumatic event that involved her husband, or soon...Read the entire review

The best surprise about the experience of watching Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the gradual realization that Sam Raimi was hired not because of his experience with putting together an excellent superhero epic with the original Spider-man duology (Not trilogy, mind you, let's not go there), but because of the kinetic energy he brought to horror in the 1980s with his trademark mix of goofy and terrifying thrills.

Sure, fans of the MCU get their share of the cameos that are expected from anyone who slaved over every frame of the film's trailers, and let's face it they weren't hard to pinpoint. Those who watched Marvel's What If on Disney Plus already got about half of them anyway. You can read your share of reviews that go into as much detail as they can about the new additions to the MCU after Disney's 20th Century Fox takeover, without offending the "NO SPOILERS!" flyer th...Read the entire review

Sometimes we are the only ones who blame ourselves for our own mistakes. Even after people have moved on from what we've done, and stopped judging us, the final hurdle becomes self-forgiveness. David (Nathaniel Ansbach) is in such a predicament as he returns to his small lakeshore upstate New York town after dropping out of college. While David and his best friend Bobby were playing with guns eight years ago, David's gun was discharged, resulting in Bobby getting shot and dying.

David's return represents an unwanted return to this painful past as the town, along with both David and Bobby's families, had already begun the long trek to overcome their communal grief. The only person who seems to find value in David's return is Bobby's sister Amanda (Gabrielle Kalomiris), a dancer who struggles with low self-worth and depression.

Amanda doesn't think she's good enough to leave this s...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I rarely review films still in theaters, but I felt compelled to share my stark disappointment with Writer/Director Neill Blomkamp's Demonic. I have watched hundreds of films since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic but I have seen only one in theaters: Tenet. After seeing the amazing teaser trailer, I vowed to see Demonic in theaters its opening weekend. Whoever cut that preview, which ultimately uses almost every cool image and scare from the film, should be given a raise, as it absolutely hyped me up for a movie that does not exist. Blomkamp exploded onto the scene in 2009 with District 9, a compelling, post-alien invasion film with plenty of social commentary amid its action. His next two, bigger-budget efforts, Read the entire review

"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future"

David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

The Movie:

Now that staying at home is the current Facebook status for a lot of people, the challenge of how to see movies that either just came out or are about to come out poses a bit of a challenge. The folks at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas have come up with Alamo at Home, a partnership with smaller movie studios to get more modest yet lauded films into homes that may be streaming larger films on the bigger box platforms, thus rendering the indie films to relative anonymity these days. With a few clicks you can find yourself looking at a film that you may not have known about until recently, like when I heard about Extra Ordinary.

The Irish production was written and directed by Mike Ahern, and stars Maeve Higgins, who plays Rose Dooley, a driving instructor, but also has a past as a spiritual medium she is trying to put b...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In a recent review I talked about checking out a recent release through a streaming service and it wound up being a good experience. But it was a soft-spoken release that was done through Kino. But now we are talking about Onward, a film that my family was set to see in the theater in March before we decided to cancel due to Coronavirus concerns, and then school cancelled and staying at home became the norm. So bless up to Disney+ and their decision to bring it out to their service, and in HDR to boot! What a country!

Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley and Keith Bunin co-wrote the film, and Scanlon directed the film, another in a long line of Pixar releases from the Pixar veteran. Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland, Spider Man: Homecoming) is an elf who just turned 16, and lives with his mother (Julia Louis ...Read the entire review

What Universal didn't understand with their wildly miscalculated Dark Universe, an attempt to ape the MCU by adapting the 1930s Universal Monster movies into big budget tentpoles, is that the originals, as grand and fantastical as they may be, thrived on small scale and intimate terror. Expanding the budget a hundred times and cranking up the action strips the chill factor from these tales, as evidenced by 2017's "inaugural" Dark Universe disaster, The Mummy, which shut down the whole cinematic universe shebang before it barely started. Desperate to squeeze any last drop from this franchise for some reason, Universal decided to start from scratch once again with a lower-budget, cerebral slow-burn horror approach, wisely bringing in producer Jason Blum's unique talents for serving b-horror with a prestige finish.

Their first entry is a metoo-era modernized adaptation of The Invisib...Read the entire review