What you need to know about Macon Blair’s Idiots is simple: this movie is very dumb. The film follows two idiots, Mark (Dave Franco) and Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), as they are tasked with a very simple assignment: transport a troubled teenager to a rehabilitation facility. The two individuals recently lost their respective jobs and have now found a gig that
Read MoreA scholar of the Cannon Group, French genre auteur Jean-François Richet is no stranger to big, goofy actioners. His last movie, Plane, was mocked for its title but lauded as an effective and downright nasty vehicle that would’ve made a killing if it had been released in the 1980s and starred Chuck Norris instead of Gerard Butler. Richet has now reached
Read MoreAs unnecessary as spinoffs can get, Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi might present itself as a series devoid of interest. I mean, the spinoff of two short films presented in the first and third seasons of Star Wars’ anime compendium Visions seems like one hell of a stretch to do an entire eight-episode series over. That said, The Ninth
Read MoreThe first forty-five minutes or so of Jacob Chase’s Insidious: Out of the Further are excellent. In that section, there are two incredible setpieces that genuinely had me on the edge of my seat. One is a Backrooms-inspired liminal horror that sees its protagonist, Gemma (Amelia Eve), trapped in a never-ending, claustrophobic hallway with creepy-looking creatures that do little more than
Read MoreRom-coms on the big screen are back! And by that, we mean films that star two of the most alluring and infectiously charming actors working today but are devoid of romance, comedy, and, most importantly, interest. Oh, and they’re also strangely reactionary and definitely feel like a byproduct of the Trump 2.0 era than what the masses would call “proper escapism.”
Read MoreWe can thank Destin Daniel Cretton as one of the architects of the MCU’s current and much needed reinvigoration, with the introspective Wonder Man being a major highlight of their post-Avengers: Endgame projects. And now there’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The fourth entry in the current Spider-Man franchise finally gives Tom Holland textured material to explore with his character, away from
Read MoreDuring the opening ceremony of the Fantasia International Film Festival, Her Private Hell director Nicolas Winding Refn was awarded a Cheval Noir Career Achievement Award for his contributions to cinema. He made an impassioned plea on the importance of a festival like Fantasia and genre cinema as a whole: “In the mid-90s, when I began, we really couldn’t make genre movies;
Read MoreWhy so gloomy, Enola? Why so drab? Why so dull? These are questions I asked myself while watching Philip Barantini’s Enola Holmes 3, a sequel that made sense, considering how great Harry Bradbeer’s 2022 second entry to one of Netflix’s most popular films was. Millie Bobby Brown was born to play the titular character at the center of Nancy Springer’s book series of the
Read MoreWatching Thomas Kail’s Moana, I felt a sense of finitude, which is something I don’t really feel while watching movies. But there was something about this dreadful shot-for-shot retread of Ron Clements and John Musker’s 2016 animated masterpiece that felt oddly melancholic. What was it, you ask? I finally realized that the era when Disney lazily releases live-action rehashes of animated
Read MoreIt’s rare to find a remake of an international film that’s better than its original text, but this is what Olivia Wilde does with The Invite. The film adapts Cesc Gay’s The People Upstairs for an American audience, which was also remade in Italy, Switzerland, France, and South Korea. Wilde, along with screenwriters Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, elevates the original film’s
Read MoreI know, another Toy Story sequel? Are they ever going to stop making these? This is a valid question, given how many agree that Toy Story 3 ended the franchise perfectly and offered thoughtful conclusions for the toys many of us grew up repeatedly watching on VHS until the tape wore out. Toy Story 4, while enjoyable, existed only to print money, and many
Read MoreFor some reason, modern audiences are having nostalgia for the Scary Movie franchise. The once-shepherded-by-the-Wayans-Brothers spoof series that parodied contemporary horror cinema had a cult following in the years after its successful release, but none of them were any good. The only ones that were watchable, Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, had David Zucker’s involvement, one of the masters of
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