Just when you thought you were safe from shark movies being genuinely scary…
Forty years after since Steven Spielberg first chummed the waters, those feeding grounds are now mostly patrolled by bottom-feeders, like the made-to-be-so-bad-it’s-good Sharknado franchise. What Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows does is provide a good argument against that next beach holiday.…
SPOILERS!
Say what you want about Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice — and I have — it’s a film that demands critical analysis.1
A reported passion project of so-called visionary director Zack Snyder,2 the film he helped birth from development hell is in dire need of an exorcism.…
Let me get the obvious comparison out of the way (at least for the first time): Suicide Squad, the latest addition to the DC Cinematic Universe, is a mess; choppy and lurid counterpart where Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice — God help us — was muggy and self-serious.
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The second box-office smash out this past week starring an amnesiac, Pixar’s Finding Dory shows how to find new and affecting resonances in an old story. Fish gets separated from family, fish goes in search of family, fish makes friends along the way.
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After almost a decade off the grid, Jason Bourne has returned in a film titled, somewhat unimaginatively, Jason Bourne.
No identities, supremacies, ultimatums, or legacies; just the man himself, played once again by Matt Damon. With Paul Greengrass back directing, too, it’s almost like he never went away.…
What is it with Disney and orphans?
It’s an age-old adage in storytelling that if you want to create a sense of danger you stick a kid somewhere dark and scary, possibly a forest, and take away all parental supervision.…
With most of the world dividing its time between Pokemon Go and sharing viral videos on Facebook, there’s never been a better time for a film like Nerve.
Based on a book by Jeanne Ryan, adapted by Jessica Sharzer of American Horror Story, and directed by Catfish’s Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, the film quickly establishes its technological mojo.…
When perhaps the greatest living filmmaker takes on the favorite story of one of the most belovec children’s authors of the 20th Century, you hope for a truly magic adventure. Instead Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG is charming but slight.
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There’s something about the technology-driven dystopias of JG Ballard that appeal to a certain breed of director.
Steven Spielberg’s mainstream adaptation of Empire of the Sun is ironically something of an oddity of an oeuvre encapsulated by the steely paraphilia of David Cronenberg’s Crash.…