Channing Tatum
Here’s the thing about the evolving Magic Mike series: It’s not about the stripping. Sure, the dance moves are fantastic, but at the heart of it, it’s about Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) trying to find his way amid shady club owners (Magic Mike), impending adulthood (Magic Mike XXL), and, finally, being someone’s everything while becoming […]
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I’ve spent the last few days trying to come up with good things to say about Smallfoot: its grand purpose, timely themes, wonderfully engaging voice casting, sterling animation, almost every aspect that I could think of. Yet the one recurring phrase coming to my mind is “middle of the road.” Don’t get me wrong; it […]
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(I apologize for the lateness of this review. The famed 24-hour bug hit my kids in sequential order during my screening of this film, then landed straight on me.) Kingsman: The Golden Circle picks up right where Kingsman: The Secret Service left off. Not as far as time elapsed between the stories each film tells, […]
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When thinking about Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, I keep flashing back to something Stu Redman said in the 1994 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Stand”: “Country don’t mean dumb.” If Soderbergh’s trilogy of Ocean’s films were finely-tuned jazz-funk, consider Logan Lucky to be its scruffier skiffle-band cousin. Sporting a misspelled “DANGERUS” tattoo and a […]
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I’m in a weird spot with The Hateful Eight, as it’s a beautiful, ugly, crass, vulgar, thrilling, suspenseful, and nigh uncomfortable film to sit through. The film’s greatest achievement is holding an uneasy tension until the “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” credit shows up at the end, and that’s not a simple task, given […]
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While doing some metal grinding in his workshop, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) hears Ginuwine’s “Pony” start blasting over his Pandora feed. Alone and unobserved, what’s a former stripper – excuse me, male entertainer – supposed to do when his old signature song comes on his shop speakers at random? Keep working, or launch straight into […]
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A frigid, monochromatic biopic that hopes audiences will perceive dead-eyed gazes and painfully slow-to-materialize dialogue as Oscar-worthy material, “Foxcatcher” tells its story with virtually zero charisma. Indeed, the film boasts dramatic transformations for Steve Carrell and Channing Tatum, but it’s tough to tell whether accolades should be given to the actors or the prosthetics department. […]
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Technology has come a long way since the special effects in “Independence Day” almost twenty years ago, but apparently the criteria for making your standard Roland Emmerich film have not. From the big, oversimplified plots and exploding buildings right down to the precocious little kid who inevitably has some hand in saving the day, not […]
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Roland Emmerich does well with spectacle movies. Who can forget the indelible image of the White House being eviscerated by alien laser fire in Independence Day? Nor can one dismiss the awesome power of the tidal wave hitting New York City in The Day After Tomorrow. With his latest film, White House Down, Emmerich goes […]
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(This review was originally published on March 28, 2013 at Reel Film News) If I were to tell you about a movie in which the President of the United States is held hostage inside his own compound while a criminal mastermind has his way with our country’s nuclear arsenal, you might think I was rehashing […]
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