Interstellar: Feeling Machine
No shortage of mechanical beauty and a heart full of intent. This doesn’t stop it from being loud.
No shortage of mechanical beauty and a heart full of intent. This doesn’t stop it from being loud.
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.
A younger cast puts a spring in this series’ step. One of X-Men’s best.
The talk of what it means to be a Mary Sue has gotten so emotional that I think it’s time for the term to disappear. But not before my final word.
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.
The rare horror film that makes you afraid of your own life, rather than for it. A paranoia masterclass.
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.
An extravagant mystery, deeply brilliant. Where mainstream meets noir and makes them both seem like a good idea.
A movie disregarded even in its own series. Flawed and beautiful as the human race it’s about.
A passionate lead performance can’t save Alita from burying itself in exposition.
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.
A thoughtful exploration of why we keep going to these movies. This is where sci-fi gets its conscience.
It’s so admirable you’ll forget the flaws in its execution. Mainstream horror with an intellectual twist.
Snyder’s baroque maleness shines through and so does his purity. He loves superheroes. You have to decide if that’s enough.
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.
Perhaps The Fly dreamt it was a romance and a horror film and a science fiction film and before it was made, loved living this triple life. Watching them collide with each other is entertaining: this is a really squirmy movie, as difficult to convince yourself to watch as to put down.
The film blasts an affectionate symphony of action spy movie set pieces, which Bird composes with such a self-believing style that he reminds me less of a director than of a virtuoso performer. And even they become a back-drop to what is essentially a mid-life crisis film, about a man who misses himself so much that he doesn’t even notice he has a family. Bird offers a genre fattened on mythic pretension a trimming alternative of joyous energy and dazzling characters.
A grimy movie that you might enjoy, provided you identify at least a little with the weirdos that live in it.
A home setting becomes a pressure cooker of nicety and resilience. Tremendous, tiny horror.
The Thing’s lack of a stable form worked for Carpenter, who was able to squeeze a pure and palpable uncertainty out of never knowing who or what the Thing exactly was. But in Heijningen’s version, it seems to be more a matter of horror tradition than the transcription of a bold idea.
Time is the canvas rather than space. Arrival’s idea of sci-fi encompasses the whole human experience.
Merely a below-average comedy that becomes a slog by whoring out its cast for an ill-conceived marketing angle.