Fixing Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a well-meaning jumble that I hope to make sense of with these changes.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a well-meaning jumble that I hope to make sense of with these changes.
A pile of discarded Halloween costumes dolled up by millions but still boring to watch.
The 22-film climax delivers on fireworks but passes up its themes. Here’s my full analysis.
Abrams returns to Star Wars to make the most pandering, convoluted, and purposeless entry in the entire saga.
With The Rise of Skywalker coming out, I wrote my final evaluation, for good and bad, of one of the most debated movies ever.
The sequels changed this movie. Its ego now shows through its history, though its action still satisfies.
Revisiting childhood after it’s over can make it more complicated than it should be. Pixar fumbled another one.
A series sendoff turns into an anthem to whining. This was not the way it should have ended.
The horror here is disquietingly personal. A masterclass in turning style into story.
My favorite of the Disney Star Wars films. It’s rough, I’ll admit, but rugged when it counts.
About as bad as a movie of its kind could be. The franchise equivalent of suicide ideation.
A ton of effort goes into figuring out what to do with a Kung fu movie. It can be beautiful, and it can also fall apart in your hands.
A movie disregarded even in its own series. Flawed and beautiful as the human race it’s about.
The Marvel formula can’t save an unappealing heroine from the greatest power in her universe: herself.
Burton explores Gotham like a house inspector: he’s all about details. He needed more heart.
The Phantom Menace is unformed as a child’s drawing, and sometimes feels as innocent, and many times threatens through sheer force of will to be charming.
If Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was a tour of fantasy-land (who else thought their feelings seemed stuffed with baubles like gift-bags from a theme park?), The Chamber of Secrets is like accidentally wandering into the maintenance closet. Something is disenchanted by it, and I can think of no harsher criticism, to call something squinty that once was wide-eyed.
What was once a man’s desperate quest to resurrect his lost lover ala Dracula has been turned into a petulant girl’s desire to reincarnate the god she serves ala Suicide Squad. Could there be a more fitting beginning to this venture?
Cuaron achieves the dark enchantment the rest of the series desires. This is a promise finally fulfilled.
Alien: Resurrection is not unified by its cynicism as Robocop was. It’s not a satire of us, but just a satire of Alien movies. It’s never boring and that’s actually something, in the realm of fourth entries. The reason this film is in the category of “Everyone Else is Wrong” is not because I think it’s good, but because I don’t know what people were expecting.
Cinema’s strongest action lady brings us the most charming gore-fest ever made.
I have not in recent memory seen a film whose concept is more divergent from its filmmaking than The Cloverfield Paradox. It is a movie so dumbfoundingly predictable and yet so incomprehensible that it becomes meaningless even as an average film, a paradox only in the sense that its grand pretensions cannot occupy the same space as the need to connect a franchise that was never intended to be cohesive.
I’m aware that Alien 3 had a troubled development and a schizophrenic screenwriting cycle, all documented to any reasonable human’s satisfaction on Wikipedia. But if the result had been miraculous, Fincher would have reaped the credit as a directorial miracle worker. Blame is now the price of that possibility.
Superman II is exciting even in its flaws: even its badness seems to defy other kinds of movies, like so long as Superman is on top of this, everything else will be okay.
Visually daunting and perfectly performed, it’s easy to ignore the film’s muddled plot and struggle to justify its existence.