John Krasinski’s IF is something of an imaginary creature in today’s cinema landscape. Paramount’s aspirant blockbuster is a full-on big budget children’s film with no attachment to established intellectual property. Compare this to essentially every other family offering coming up this summer: Despicable Me 4, The Garfield Movie, Inside Out 2, Harold and the Purple Crayon. The big purple elephant in the room is the weird imaginary friend movie that is a big studio risk in desperate search for an audience. This audience, one imagines, is families. The kids come for the colorful creatures that are wholly unrecognizable to them, and the parents stay for…potentially life threatening heart surgery?

The shame is that the diverse array of computer-generated imaginary things (they prefer to be called “ifs” for whatever reason) are mostly great visual effects, and they also are occasionally characters with personality. The potential for this to be Continue reading IF (2024) Movie Review →