Wang! Bang! Pow!
Kill lives up to its title, and then some. In many regards, the hyperviolent “vengeance is a dish best served ice cold” action film sells itself short by not calling itself Overkill.
This said, it takes a while to get to this level of breathless brutality. With great intentionality, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s film takes 45 minutes or so to establish a Continue reading Kill (2024) Movie Review
George Miller’s Furiosa is a prequel to his acclaimed fourth Mad Max film, Fury Road. It tells the story of how Furiosa (portrayed by Charlize Theron in Fury Road and Anya Taylor-Joy here) found herself in the employ of the despotic leader of the Citadel, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, who is only slightly less menacing than Fury Road’s Hugh Keays-Byrne).
Beyond being one of those prequels that merely traces the line back to the start, Furiosa also spends much of its runtime fleshing out the world of the Mad Max Wasteland and the three tenuously symbiotic settlements that keep life there from snuffing out. The combination of these two threads – the personal story of Furiosa and the grander narrative of human survival – make for a film that weaves vengeance and history-making into an epic yarn.
As one character describes of Furiosa, there is “a purposeful savagery” to both the film and its world. Miller takes pains to make the Wasteland appear Continue reading Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) Movie Review
Wes Ball’s The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes moves the world of the 2010s Apes trilogy multiple generations of apes into the future. Caeser (Andy Serkis) long deceased, the planet of the apes has mostly forgotten his impact on their world. Apes now live in clans, scattered around the ruins of human cities. One gorilla, who has adopted the name Caeser for himself, wants more than a clan. He desires an empire. Proximus Caeser (Kevin Durrand) violently destroys neighboring clans and brings the surviving apes into his kingdom.
This includes the “Eagle Clan” of which young Noa (Owen Teague) is a part. Noa witnesses the death of Continue reading Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Movie Review
David Leitch’s The Fall Guy is, in many respects, a love letter to the stunt performers that have allowed cinema to function properly for many a decade. At this level, the film definitely excels. Stuntman Colt Seavers’ (Ryan Gosling) opening voiceover monologue keys us in to the philosophy of the stunt performer: they keep everything looking exciting and propulsive, but their job is to be invisible by design. The best stunt performer disappears. Remember this; it will be important later.
Leitch’s comedy-action-romance benefits from the residual effects of the dump-truck of charisma that was Ryan Gosling in Barbie. Fittingly, the film opens the 2024 Summer movie season and promises an Continue reading The Fall Guy (2024) Movie Review
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare tries hard to be a rag-tag action film with a roguish, rugged charm. Based (however loosely) on the book Churchill’s Secret Warriors by Damien Lewis, about the small group of fighters covertly deployed by the British military during World War II, the film depicts Operation Postmaster. Postmaster was a mission to steal three German cargo ships that provided essential supplies for the Nazi U-boats. As the movie tells it, the U-boats were vital to the German’s control over the Atlantic Ocean, and thus cause for reticence when it came to the United States’ decision to join the War.
The film tries hard, and you can feel it. You can feel the four screenwriters – some possibly brought in simply for punching up the quips – producing the dialogue. You can hear the hope for Continue reading The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) Movie Review
Somewhere in the midst of the haggard kerfuffle that is the frozen empire of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore tells Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz something to the effect of the old cliché, “we’re getting too old for this.” This does not come across like a self-aware nod toward the inherent redundancy and inessential nature of Hollywood reboot culture. It feels more like the film accidentally self-reporting.
Personally (and fortunately, perhaps), I did not have to get too old before realizing that it is a waste of one’s time and energy to Continue reading Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Movie Review
Alex Garland’s previous film, Men (2022), was provocative, but it provoked one’s attention for the sake of a statement without much depth to it. Civil War, the filmmaker’s latest, is marketed and branded as a highly provocative sign-of-the-times political thriller. It wants on the one hand to be an eerie premonition of where the United States Democracy is heading as the country trudges through yet another contentious election year. But it is, in execution, far less provocative than it hopes to be, despite claiming to have a deeply resonant statement to make.
If Civil War is on the one hand an aspiring premonition, it is on the other a Continue reading Civil War (2024) Movie Review
Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s I.S.S. is a low-budget thriller set in the shoebox of a set replicating the International Space Station. The film sets out to be a slow-burn potboiler (despite a 95-minute runtime), where chummy colleagues are thrown into an international geopolitical dispute that sows distrust and paranoia. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) is greeted warmly by the crew of the space station, who hail equally from Russia and the United States. Her first day working as a biologist on the station ends in a drunken celebration and Kira looking out onto Earth’s surface. Weronika (Maria Mashkova) and Alexey (Pilou Asbæk) joke that Kira doesn’t understand the full weight of seeing the world from the outside, where you can no longer see borders.
The first 15 minutes of I.S.S. (and the last few moments of the film) harp on this obvious bit of foreshadowing: in the Space Station, there are no Continue reading I.S.S. (2024) Movie Review
With Self Reliance, Jake Johnson and The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer) have made a broad comedy rendition of David Fincher’s The Game. After a bad breakup with his partner, an aimless Thomas Walcott (Johnson) jumps at the chance to play a mysterious game of life and death, to be live-streamed to the dark web. The rules are simple: Thomas must survive 30 days of being hunted by assassins from Greenland who may or may not ever find him and who cannot harm him if he is within striking distance of another person. Seeing this last part as an exploitable loophole (more of a rule than a loophole, as it were), Thomas accepts the challenge.
For the first few days, Thomas is golden. He wakes up, lazily rides a recumbent bicycle, has a few shots of whisky at a bar, and calls it a day. No sign of any “production assistant ninjas” ready to film his murder. Then, one night, a window breaks while he is sleeping and he discovers Continue reading Self Reliance (2024) Movie Review
Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall was a pleasant surprise and a critical success for Netflix. His follow-up, The Book of Clarence, takes a similarly anachronistic approach to a familiar genre. This time, Samuel takes on the religious epic. The film presents an alternative biblical story adjacent to the story of the last days of Jesus Christ. This apocrypha is simplistic and familiar, so much so that when David Oyelowo’s John the Baptist exposition dumps the premise unnecessarily the plot itself almost feels like a punchline.
Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) and his friend Elijah (RJ Cyler) owe a man known as Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi Abrefa) money that they don’t have. To further complicate things, Clarence is Continue reading The Book of Clarence (2024) Movie Review
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