Reviews Deadpool 2. We live in a weird, expanding world of sequels. Defined by diminishing returns, they have also become a certainty: Anything that generates revenue on a certain scale will be quickly followed by as many follow-ups as the market will bear. This newly risen reality can be exciting (more of a good thing, […]
John J. Bennett
Posted inArts + Scene
Free Gabrielle Union and Melissa McCarthy
Reviews BREAKING IN. For longer than I’d really care to countenance (probably the release of Bring It On in 2000) I’ve found Gabrielle Union to be a consummately compelling actor who should be in major releases with her name above the title. There are vestigial traces of the old weak knees, mild palpitations playground crush […]
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Bad Samaritan is … Bad
Reviews BAD SAMARITAN. There can be fun in a bad movie. The histrionics of ill-prepared actors, the guilty satisfaction of DIY-grade effects, the cheap thrill of catching a boom microphone dipping into frame. It can shrink the distance between the makers and the audience. Earnest effort can be endearing, charming for its lack of charm […]
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Ad Infinitum
Reviews AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. Why a superhero movie, of all things, should need to start from a screenplay of Dickensian bulk — teeming with characters and settings but lacking the wit, vitality, sense of time and place, and joy of language that made that author’s work significant and occasionally enjoyable — continues to elude me. […]
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To the Dogs
Reviews RAMPAGE. Dear Mr. Johnson (née The Rock): Your fans are small but we are many. You are one but you are great, and you carry on your crafted shoulders our hopes and dreams. We love you and we are worried about you. Many of the movies you are making are borderline nonsense. We understand […]
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Silence is Golden
Reviews A QUIET PLACE. I’ve probably written more than one ought to about the state of contemporary horror movies and my on-again, off-again love affair with them. For a time, the genre seemed like it might be a bellwether of an upwelling of creativity in American cinema. It looked like a return to the rough […]
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Head in the Game
REVIEWS READY PLAYER ONE. I found myself mounting a preemptive defense for this movie some weeks ago. A friend (and frequent contributor to these pages, actually, but colleague sounds pretentious) told me he had tried and failed, angrily, to read the Ernest Cline novel upon which it is based. He picked it up, he informed […]
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Out of Retirement
Reviews PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING. There are a number of substantial roadblocks to success in the path of this sequel. “What might they be?” asked no one. Well: The premise of the first movie (big monsters from another dimension fighting big robots from this one), wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, a point I’m sure any student of mecha-anime […]
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Tomb Raider Lacks Game but Simon Earns a Little Love
Reviews TOMB RAIDER. Having never been a gamer of any real focus or wherewithal — at all, really — Tomb Raider is a property that offers precious little by way of interest. Mostly because I didn’t play the video game but also because Angelina Jolie has yet to enter my celebrity fetishization pantheon, I didn’t […]
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Gringo, Thoroughbreds and A Wrinkle in Time
Reviews GRINGO. On the face of it, Gringo would seem to offer just enough of a number of titillating things to ensure a fine time at the movies: corporate intrigue, criminal hijinks down ol’ Mexico way, pharmaceutical cannabis, a mercenary on the prowl. What’s not to like? And, fair enough, all those things do indeed […]
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Cold War Warmed Over
REVIEWS RED SPARROW. There is something — a great number of things, probably — to be said in art and cinema and literature about the renewing of hostilities between the United States and Russia, the questionable end of the Cold War these three decades on and the macho-posturing, democracy reducing, oligarch good-old-boys clubs running the […]
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Strange Expectations
Reviews GAME NIGHT. We live in a time of lowered expectations, especially when it comes to the movies. And yet, somehow I often find just enough optimism, somewhere, within this long thought dry well, to fall for the marketing or the pedigree or the fleeting hopeful mood of an afternoon and give a movie the […]