With the release of Iron Man (2008) we had the first post-credits scene in a Marvel movie, setting up the formation of the Avengers. The Avengers (2012) ended with our first glimpse of Thanos (leaving a lot of non-Marvel devotees wondering, “Who was
Read more…It’s difficult to quickly describe Sorry to Bother You, starting with the title: is it a nod to a telemarketer’s lame excuse for trying to sell you something you neither want or need, or is it the filmmakers ironically talking to the audience, trying
In a recent article in The Daily Beast, it was suggested that Marvel’s first superhero movie, over 20 years ago, featured a black superhero—Blade. Despite the success of that movie and its two sequels (over $400 million box office) and the participat
Old superheroes never die, mainly because they never get old. (I mean, how long has Peter Parker been a teenager?) They get retconned, resurrected, reimagined, but basically they stay the same, forever. Or one of their superpowers is immortality.
It’s
Read more…James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, numerous other novels and stories, once said:
People tell me, don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there
Read more…Two things about Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out (he’s the shorter of the comedy team Key & Peele): (1) It might superficially remind you of the 2005 horror film The Skeleton Key, but it’s not really a lot like that movie. (2) The title, I b
2016 was a banner year for genre movies, mostly people in spandex but a few others were sneaked in. and some of them weren’t even people.
There were two movies featuring ETs last year, one released with great fanfare, one more quietly. One received ei
Read more…Good news for Star Trek fans. First, all the events depicted in the movies since 2009 are officially designated as taking place in the “Kelvin Timeline” (formerly the “Abramsverse,” “JJverse,” etc.). These events now take place in an “alternate reali
Part of what makes something an initial success is simply the fact that they were first. There had always been horror-comedies but most of them featured Abbot and Costello meeting Universal’s Classic Monsters. Then Ghostbusters came along in 1984.
It
Read more…What can you say about a movie that’s filled with graphic, gratuitous violence, substance abuse, a constant stream of profanity and inappropriate dialogue, sexual humor on the most juvenile level, and cynical characters who don’t seem to care for any
It’s not too much of a stretch to say that the root causes of the events in Captain America: Civil War are the same as the root cause of that other Civil War, servitude verses self-determination. The United Nations decides that despite saving the wor
So, we’re going to talk about a movie that you can’t talk about because so much of it is spoilers, big and small. So we’ll talk about how well they did what they did without talking about… what they did, too much. (Spoilers will be redacted.)
Star War
Read more…There was a meme a while back where this befuddled guy is saying, “Star Wars? Jurassic Park? Terminator? Mad Max? What year is this?” You may be saying that as well, as you’re taking your kids (or grandkids) to movies you saw when you were their age.
When we first met Max Rockatansky (Mad Max, 1979) he was a police officer in an Australia that was not quite dystopian but certainly just a couple of power outages away. We next saw him sometime later, Somewhere in the Outback (Mad Max 2, bka The Roa
It doesn’t mean we’re bad, really; maybe it’s hard-wired into our brains. We’ve traded lions in coliseums for NASCAR, pillories for TMZ, paying to watch people in asylums for reality (sorry, “non-scripted”) TV. But the core principle is the same: we’
We give personal names to our boats, our cars, we talk to the snack machine when it doesn't dispense our selection. We talk to our smartphones and they talk back—but it’s only programmed responses--
For now…
The Turing Test says that if a machine exhib
Read more…It’s helpful to remember two things going into Interstellar. The first is that Christopher Nolan is known for directing two kinds of movies: Movies with Batman and Movies Without Batman. The latter movies (Identity, Memento, The Prestige, Inception)
This is a new column to feature mostly movies that were missed when they were “new” but also classics, oddities, whatever is of “historical interest” or just plain “interesting.” We begin with her.
So you’re texting someone for, let’s say an hour, an
It seems, translated from the French, “Luc Besson,” in English, is “Michael Bey.” Both directors are renowned for their visual style, slick editing, and the way they can attract A-list actors to their projects. Both are also noted for efforts that fa
I was not a big fan of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011); despite some (then) cutting-edge CGI and a great cast, the story had too many plot holes and lapses in logic, mostly for the sake of making a cool-looking movie, to overlook. But unlike ot
