The opening moments of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is a distinct departure from the cold and mechanic action of Dune: Part One, as Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and the Fremen, lead an attack on Harkonnen scouts as they are about to reach Sietch Tabr. The action doesn’t feel as stilted as in Villeneuve’s previous works, which, while beautifully shot, had
Read MoreChoi Dong-hoon reinvents the language of time travel cinema through his Alienoid series. With its sequel, Alienoid: Return to the Future, now in theaters, the director takes even bigger storytelling, and aesthetic, risks to enthrall viewers. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” is the core tenet Christopher Nolan attempted to introduce its audiences within his time-travel sci-fi drama Tenet. But
Read MoreWith Godzilla: Minus One making its way to movie theatres very soon and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters releasing on AppleTV+, I embarked on a rather ambitious project in preparation: watch every live-action Godzilla movie produced by Toho and rank them from worst to best. Before this project, I had already seen Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla alongside the animated
Read More2023 has seen the resurgence of the rags-to-riches-to-rags biopic with Tetris, BlackBerry, The Beanie Bubble, and now Pain Hustlers. It wouldn’t be a problem if all of these movies were good, but only one of the five is well worth watching because it subverts the traditional biopic tropes in favor of something more energetic. Who would’ve thought a movie about the
Read MoreOppenheimer director Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite filmmakers. He has consistently pushed the boundaries of large-format filmmaking since shooting several sequences with IMAX cameras with The Dark Knight and is always at the forefront of crafting one-of-a-kind, towering cinematic experiences. Even his weakest movie, 2020’s Tenet, deserves praise for its insane practical action and inverted one-on-one fights. You’ll never see
Read MoreThe Pope has his Popemobile. The Pope’s Exorcist has his ExorcistMobile. Strutting around the streets of Italy in a scooter, Father Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe) dedicates his life to the Vatican and the exorcism of demons. His boss, the Pope (Franco Nero), tells him of a demon, unlike anything they’ve ever heard of in a Spanish abbey which has possessed a
Read MoreAs a die-hard fan of the Scream franchise (and an ardent defender of 2011’s Scream 4), I hated 2022’s Scream “requel.” It was a lazy attempt at weaponizing the nostalgia of the original with a newer cast who couldn’t match the incredible chemistry Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette had in the previous installments. Worse yet, none of the performances
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