20th Century Fox
For 45 years, two cinematic creatures have brought terror to movie theaters and TV screens all over the world. First seen in Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien, the ovomorph (known generally as the facehugger) and the xenomorph were nightmares brought to hellish life. To quote one of that film’s characters, the xenomorph is “the perfect organism. […]
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Interesting. My last review (Nightsiren) was about a woman returning to her remote village where the citizens treat her with disdain. Similarly, Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You also features a woman living in a town where the inhabitants don’t seem to care for her presence. At all. And like Nightsiren, the reasons are […]
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The reason Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot series succeeds is through his portrayal of a man obsessed with the corporeal and his belief in human nature and its folly; no room can be made in his world for the supernatural or the impossible. He is the essence of what writer Christopher McQuarrie describes in his […]
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I’ve rated Bohemian Rhapsody three stars for each reason you absolutely should see this movie: the performances, the surprisingly effective recontextualization of established Queen songs (as both a plus and a negative), and for being a perfectly serviceable introduction to the legend of Farrokh Bulsara, a.k.a. Freddie Mercury. Beyond this, there are serious problems with […]
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Years ago, a friend would always end our Foosball games with something he called the G.E.C.P. – the “game-ending crowd pleaser.” With lots of ballyhoo and without fail, he’d sink the shot at impossible speed, the ball thunking into the goal with a louder resonance than the other goals. I was often on the receiving […]
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What’s the most important thing to you when you’re in your early grade school years and you don’t quite fit in? The friend you find whose misfit level matches yours. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is a raucous and gleeful celebration of such friendships, no matter how dressed up in puerile juvenility this film […]
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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children may be summed up by this simple statement: Tim Burton does Guillermo Del Toro. That notion alone is worth a trip to the cinema to catch this larger-than-life spectacle of fantasy, horror, and adventure, as the film blends the best of Burton’s whimsy found in Edward Scissorhands (to be […]
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If you don’t know what a teabag is—and I don’t mean the Earl Grey kind—then “Deadpool” might not be for you. Marvel gives itself a full reach-around in this gloriously profane comic book adaptation, which stars Ryan Reynolds as bottom-feeding mercenary Wade Wilson, and director Tim Miller wildly overcompensates for the watered-down version of the character we […]
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Another tour de force from Alejandro González Iñárritu, “The Revenant” couldn’t be further from last year’s quizzical “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”), even if Michael Keaton himself were to sashay onto the screen in his underpants. Returning DP Emmanuel Lubezki once again displays his mastery of the protracted sequence, but this time around […]
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Peanuts fans, take heart! The Peanuts Movie is *not* an insult to the cartoons and comic strips you and I loved while we were growing up; it’s something you’ll actually enjoy with your children and everyone with whom you’ve shared your love of all the wonderful characters that live in Hennepin County. Well, mostly, and […]
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