Walking out of the theater from Robert Schwentke’s “Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins,” I couldn’t help feeling a sense of coyness. For everything action-oriented about the story, there was a reserved feeling. The film is full of incredible spectacle and strongly defined characters whose arcs are carried to their logical conclusion, especially for an origin [...]
Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” This applies equally to the rambunctious “Zola” from A24, now in theaters. Based on a viral Tweet and judiciously covered by the Rolling Stone article, “Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted” by David Kushner [...]
Premiering at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and handily winning both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” a magnificent look at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival demonstrates what work, determination and most importantly, a celebration of music looks like. [...]
The “Fast and Furious” series made its name on ‘family,’ or the concept of a family formed out of disparate persons coming together for a common cause. The films have gone the world over and seen The Rock, Kurt Russell, and Helen Mirren join its ranks. They’ve even branched out into a sub-series featuring The [...]
I don’t think I would qualify myself as a lover of musicals. “Damn, I just got my gay card back with my words on “Rita Moreno,” and now I have to give it up again?” Nah. Here to save me, here to save movie theaters, and perhaps here to give us all a breath of [...]
An interesting thought occurred to me as I sat down to watch Craig Gillespie’s “Cruella.” I am not a studied acolyte of the works of Dodie Smith. Or of Bill Peet’s animated classic, let alone Glenn Close’s two turns as the nefarious Cruella de Vil. So, it would seem natural that my indoctrination to this [...]
Hot off 2020’s “The Gentlemen,” Guy Ritchie is back with his latest, the suave, and sophisticated “Wrath of Man.” Jason Statham fills the definition of suave to a ‘T,’ or rather an ‘H.’ Ritchie gives us just enough to be curious about who ‘H’ is. Knowing Ritchie’s film library, anything less than explosive would be [...]
Mortal Kombat We live in an era of reboots and sequels where groups of disparate people come together for a common cause. Some have worked well (see “Logan” and “X-Men: First Class” as examples), while others have not worked out so well (see Josh Trank’s “Fantastic Four” as an example.) Don’t take that last suggestion [...]
Early on in “Godzilla vs. Kong,” there's a moment that sets the entire stage for the film – that of one of the most basic of human traits; an intrinsic and rather tacit gesture that symbolically defines the awesome and fierce battle to be laid in front of our eyes. Now, to put this into [...]
The difficulty of appreciating a film like “Raya and the Last Dragon” does not lie with the animation or the characters. Both are strong aspects of the film, which opens in theaters and on Disney Plus with Premier Access today. The challenge isn’t with the fact that I was not too fond of the movie. [...]
