James Franco and John Lithgow star in director Rupert Wyatt’s prequel. Some old potion is served up in a reasonably spiffy new bottle in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Resurrecting a lucrative franchise for another go-round 43 years after Charlton Heston first found himself on the short end of the evolutionary pyramid, Fox has wisely steered […]
Continue Reading
The “Harry Potter” prequel “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” is a big-budget, holiday-timed blockbuster about … racism, which may not exactly be the joyful, escapist entertainment families are looking for this time of year. Certainly, J.K. Rowling’s entire literary and cinematic empire is based on a foundation of serious, moralistic themes, explored through an […]
Continue Reading
Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill, Volume 2” is an exuberant celebration of moviemaking, coasting with heedless joy from one audacious chapter to another, working as irony, working as satire, working as drama, working as pure action. I liked it even more than “Kill Bill, Volume 1” (2003). It’s not a sequel but a continuation and completion, […]
Continue Reading
To say Bajrangi Bhaijaan is geared towards maximum emotional impact is an understatement. It is engineered for it. Its parts have been carefully assembled so as to make you laugh every other scene, tear up every 10 minutes. One normally gets this kind of emotional walloping with a Rajkumar Hirani film, but Bajrangi Bhaijaan hits […]
Continue Reading
Guess what online readers? Tonight, I got to watch “Venom,” which came out five days ago. Now, I will give everyone my thoughts on the movie. Matthew Rozsa started his review by admitting, “Call me crazy — certainly I’m in a minority when it comes to my fellow critics — but I liked “Venom.” Heck, if it […]
Continue Reading
BACK IN 2011, when Guillermo del Toro was first starting to hype his forthcoming movie Pacific Rim, he gleefully described it as “giant fucking monsters against giant fucking robots.” That’s how he always talked about it, with childlike glee. But he was also steeped in its antecedents: Toho monster films, Voltron, decades of sci-fi. The film he was planning was a playground […]
Continue Reading
Deep Purple famously asked their sound engineers to make “everything louder than everything else”, a phrase variously adopted by the likes of Motörhead and Meat Loaf to characterise their OTT ethos. It’s clearly struck a chord with George Miller as he reboots his low-budget 1979 road-warrior hit with more money, more trucks, and much more noise. Watching Mad Max: […]
Continue Reading
The musical score plays an even greater role in “The Godfather: Part II” than it did in the original film. Nostalgic, mournful, evoking lost eras, it stirs emotions we shouldn’t really feel for this story, and wouldn’t, if the score were more conventional for a crime movie. Why should we regret the passing of a […]
Continue Reading
The gang is back behind the wheel for this latest fuming blockbuster, which cruises along nimbly enough before putting the exhaust in exhaustion. The seventh instalment in any franchise is rarely the most anticipated. Police Academy: Mission to Moscow was the final straw. No-one looked forward to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Freddy’s 1994 stagger down […]
Continue Reading
Most of the gang is back – but the sense of fun that catapulted the original to success is drowned out by desperation in this bigger, louder follow-up crime caper. Being a Hollywood sequel, Now You See Me 2 of course comes supersized. It’s significantly longer than its predecessor, running over two hours. The first film took a short […]
Continue Reading