Category: Film
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Besides the sex scene, set to Rickie Lee Jones singing, “It Must Be Love” (which means Al Pacino sings it later as he gleefully reminisces), Frankie and Johnny avoids revealing too much about the private tenderness between Pacino and romantic interest Michelle Pfeiffer. At one point, he says something to her as their first date…
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Scarface is a film with a lot of problems. Most consequentially, there’s no character development for Al Pacino; any time there’s ostensibly character development, the film cuts ahead a month or three, or there’s a montage sequence. But the film is incredibly hands-off with Pacino’s character and arc. It leaves Pacino to vamp throughout to…
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The Rider is a harrowing experience. The film establishes its stakes from the second or third scene; rodeo cowboy Brady Jandreau is recovering from a head injury. His horse threw him and stomped on his head, requiring a metal plate. He can never ride again, except his entire life has been about being a cowboy.…
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Dancing Pirate has multiple awkward points: the omnipresent brownface, the astounding action conclusion (not astounding in a good way), or just the charmless lead performances. The film tells the tale of Bostonian Charles Collins, who—on his way to visit a relation—gets kidnapped and taken aboard a pirate ship. Hence the title. Collins is a superb…
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Given its problems, The Capture’s better than it should be. It’s also never quite as good as it could be—director Sturges starts doing a fantastic chase scene in the third act, but then it quickly peters out, which is too bad because the third act needs something. But the film manages to overcome its weird…
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I fully expected One Night in Miami to end with a real-life picture of the film’s historical subjects. The film recounts—with fictional flourish—the night of February 25, 1964, when Muhammad Ali (then still Cassius Clay) defeated Sonny Liston to become the world heavyweight champion. He celebrated his win with Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam…
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The first act of Seobok is an espionage thriller (or the first act of one), the second act is a buddy action road picture, the third act is a Sturm und Drang superhero movie. Well, superhuman movie, at least. The best part is the second act when spy-who-tried-to-get-out-but-they-pull-him-back-in Gong Yoo is teaching new charge Park…
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The Color of Money opens with a brief narration explaining the pool game variation nine-ball. Director Scorsese does the narration, which is the most interest he ever shows in the game of pool for the rest of the movie. The narration serves a straightforward purpose—it lets the audience know when to know the game is…
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I recently joked to a friend I wanted to claim “audacity” as a complementary phrase, but just for Stanley Kubrick. Something simple like, “Stanley Kubrick: Audacity can be a compliment.” But then she called me on it being gross. The Nice Guys is basically, “Shane Black: Humility is for [slur we’re allowed to use because…
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Halloween H20 is an impressively short motion picture. It’s got an eighty-six-minute runtime, but the end credits run four minutes plus. The opening titles run three minutes, plus the cold open teaser runs ten. So the main action barely runs seventy minutes, thirty minutes of story, forty minutes of slasher suspense. It’s been twenty years…
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Woman in the Dark is literally a movie from before they knew how to make movies like Woman in the Dark. The film’s also fairly obviously done on the cheap, and director Rosen doesn’t bring anything to it. But it’s a film noir story trapped in a Pre-Code romantic drama. For a while, it’s a…
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The nice thing about Eternals is the film’s most damaging element is obvious. Richard Madden is terrible. He’s not the lead—when Eternals has a lead, it’s Gemma Chan—but he’s top gun, so he gets a lot of screen time. And he’s terrible. What’s even funnier about Madden being terrible is the film leans into him…
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Summer Days, Summer Nights never really has any “grabber” moments. It’s got a couple big misses, one I’ve got a lot to say about, the other would technically be a spoiler. If it weren’t also a total cop-out. The movie looks the cop-out in the eye and blinks, with writer, director, and costar Burns deciding…
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Thirty-six years after its release, recreating the original Aliens (albeit on home media) experience is difficult. Not only has there been a direct sequel, there have been multiple reboot sequels, and the extended, “special edition” version has been readily available for nineteen years now. I’m not ready for an Aliens canon deep-dive, but when did…
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Tin Cup’s got very few problems. It’s just a romantic comedy about a ne’er-do-well golf pro who decides to improve himself to impress his rival’s girlfriend. There’s a little more nuance to it, but not much. Kevin Costner plays the hero, Rene Russo plays the love interest, Don Johnson plays the other guy. Because all…
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Full Metal Jacket is a film of big swings. Director and co-writer Kubrick hits them all. The three most prominent are the structure, the character study, and the whole arc. The structure and arc are different because the film's got two distinct sections. Minutes one to forty-five or so is a "We're in the Marines…
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At the beginning, Visiting Hours pretends it will be about network news commentator Lee Grant. Despite being openly Canadian, the film also pretends it takes place in Washington D.C., based on the hate mail responses protagonist Michael Ironside frames on his wall. They never specify, so maybe he did write Grant when she worked in…
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Oh, no, Scream 4 is Wes Craven’s last movie. At multiple times throughout, I remember thinking, “at least this isn’t Wes Craven’s last movie.” Not sure what I thought his last movie would have been, but I didn’t really think it would be this mess of a too-late sequel. Though I guess I’m curious if…
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The Matrix Resurrections opens with a "cover" of the opening of the original Matrix movie. It takes a while before it makes sense in the narrative, but basically, new cast members Jessica Henwick and Toby Onwumere are watching the scene where Carrie-Anne Moss escapes from Hugo Weaving. Only it's not Carrie-Anne Moss or Hugo Weaving;…
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The best scene in The Fabulous Dorseys is the jam session with Art Tatum. It’s the only time in the movie about jazz there are Black people, and it’s the only time the movie really lets The Fabulous Dorseys be fabulous. The film’s a biopic about band leaders brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, who play…
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I watched most of The Linguini Incident’s 108-minute runtime waiting to go read the IMDb trivia page and discover what wealthy New Yorker bankrolled a movie for their kid to star in with Hollywood actors. Except there’s no such item on the trivia page, and it doesn’t appear to be the backstory to the film’s…
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I understand there are reasons for The Matrix Revolutions. If that one rumor is true, it’s basically Keanu Reeves didn’t want to do sequels forever, and the Wachowskis wanted to do a long-running franchise. Old Internet gossip (oddly more reliably than some later Internet gossip, but still… Internet gossip). And then the costume changes… the…
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I’m trying to think of something nice to say about The Matrix Reloaded. None of the returning good guys give bad performances? None of the leading returning good guys? Like, Gloria Foster’s back and, while she doesn’t give a bad performance, it’s an utterly charmless one heavily leveraging her charm in the last movie. But…
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The Matrix starts kicking ass in the second half. The first act clunks along, introducing both Keanu Reeves’s plot and then the Carrie-Anne Moss and Laurence Fishburne one. The second act makes a lot of promises and stumbles delivering on them. There’s this big fight scene between Reeves and Fishburne, and instead of accelerating the…
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Spider-Man: No Way Home’s got a very appropriate title. There’s just no way to bring this one home, not for any of the things it tries to do. Though “tries” might be stretching it, No Way Home’s script feels like it’s four different ideas strung together with plot points dependent on the latest Academy Award-nominated…
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Hotel Splendide is based on a novel by Marie Redonnet. She doesn’t get any credit in the film, director Gross instead taking the full writing credit. Guess the WGA is good, actually. The film having a novel source explains a few things, principally why Hugh O’Conor is narrating the movie. O’Conor’s ostensibly an aquaphobic staying…
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Like most superhero origin stories, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse suffers from some third-act problems. It doesn’t just have a lengthy final fight scene between new Spider-Man (voiced by Shameik Moore) and Kingpin (Liev Schreiber in maybe the film’s only pointless voice casting), it’s got some inherently reduced stakes being an animated movie with a PG…
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I don’t think I’d ever have foreseen the Heartland Family Crime Saga genre. Or how it basically employs every white actor who isn’t in a Marvel movie (currently) or once tangentially appeared in some East or West Coast Crime Saga. For example, I didn’t recognize George Carroll from his Ben Affleck Boston Crime Sagas. And…
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What is it with Halloween sequels and hospitals? This time it’s Danielle Harris spending most of the movie in the hospital. Sure, it’s officially a children’s clinic and appears to be shot in a converted house, but it’s still a Halloween movie where the lead damsel in distress is in a hospital bed. The plot…
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Venom: Let There Be Carnage is under ninety minutes without the end credits, which is fine. While the third act is a perfectly decent bit of action “gore,” once it’s clear Naomie Harris and Woody Harrelson aren’t going to stop embarrassing themselves, the sooner the movie can end, the better. Harrelson is the titular Carnage,…
The Stop Button 