David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz are two of the producers of Sam Hargrave’s Matchbox: The Movie, an adaptation of the popular Mattel IP of the same name. They now run Hollywood’s biggest media conglomerate, Skydance, a company that owns some of the country’s most significant assets and makes Disney’s acquisition of the 20th Century library seem tame by comparison. There’s lots
Read MoreIt feels great to not only see a major blockbuster that looks and feels like a movie—with heightened colors, expressive camerawork, baroque lighting compositions, A-list actors giving boisterous, theatrical performances—but also to see great reverence expressed for the source material it’s adapting. In fact, Kitao Sakurai’s transposition of CAPCOM’s Street Fighter might be the first live-action film entry in a franchise
Read MoreJohn Cena-led Matchbox: The Movie released on Apple TV earlier this month. Starring alongside Cena in the Skydance film are Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Teyonah Parris, and Arturo Castro. Does this movie capture the imaginative mind of a child playing with toy cars, or instead does it just recapture the pain of modern blockbuster action films? Director Sam Hargrave has worked in
Read MoreDirectorial choices can undoubtedly hamper a film, and no motion picture released this year proves this inextricable fact more than Paul Greengrass’ The Uprising. The film is allegedly a prequel to the legend of Robin Hood, but not really. The marketing desperately tried to convey that this was a thrilling reinterpretation of the archetypal story, but Greengrass’ style proves unsuitable for
Read MoreAfter Marvel Studios fumbled the production of Bassam Tariq’s vision for Blade with Mahershala Ali, the director and actor both left the long-gestating MCU project to do Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. The action movie then used Ali’s training for Eric Brooks to instead put him in a tormented character study about a single Muslim father trying to do right
Read MorePrime Video’s Neagley series is the first spinoff of Reacher. This show has the opportunity to explore a character who has always existed close to Reacher while remaining quite different from him. Frances Neagley (Maria Sten) was initially introduced as a supporting character in the Alan Ritchson-led Reacher series, but she never really felt like one. Instead, the show made her
Read MoreAt Fantastic Fest 2026, the amazing people at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar have curated a lineup full of titles with great potential. We’re anticipating so many films that it was difficult to fit everything that deserves to be on my list. Last year at the film festival was incredible to experience with films like Bugonia, Primate, and so much more,
Read MoreThere isn’t a better way to open the 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival than with a special screening of Na Hong-jin’s Hope. This is the South Korean genre artist’s first feature in ten years, following the masterful The Wailing in 2016. It’s been a while, which made the prospect of a Cannes premiere all the more special for
Read MoreIn Apple TV’s Mayday, writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein take us back to 1980’s Russia in the midst of the Cold War, a markedly harsher and more grounded backdrop than the two have explored before. Daley and Goldstein are no strangers to the action comedy genre: both 2018’s Game Night and 2023’s Dungeons and Dragons – Honor Among Thieves
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