The Netflix fantasy adventure film Damsel puts a modern feminist spin on some of the most traditionally sexist tropes of the fairy tale genre. That really shouldn’t be too controversial a thing to do, but because our real world is such a dumpster fire right now, probably will be. Some members of the viewing audience… Read More Distress Signals | Damsel (2024) on Netflix
The time has come once more for the film industry’s biggest night of self-congratulatory back-patting. Perhaps this year more than ever, I’m just not feeling it. The front-running movie felt preordained to win both the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars ever since the moment the nominations were announced, and quite honestly, I could not… Read More Obligatory Oscar Winners Announcement – 2024 Edition
In September 2023, two new non-fiction books were published to capitalize on what was originally intended to be the theatrical release of Denis Villeneuve’s mega-budget sequel Dune: Part Two. Unfortunately, that film’s launch date was postponed to early 2024, leaving both books stranded with no obvious thematic tie-in, except each other. I’ve previously reviewed A… Read More A Secret Report within the Guild | The Spice Must Flow (2023) Book Review
Far off, in a harsh desert landscape isolated from the centers of civilization, a small pocket of humanity struggles to claw out a meager existence from the unforgiving environment. As if not difficult enough on its own, that challenge is made nearly impossible by sudden attacks from monstrous sandworms burrowing beneath the ground right under… Read More Underground Goddamn Monsters! | Tremors (1990) Arrow Video 4K Ultra HD
Released in early 1992, advertising for the crime thriller Deep Cover played up star Laurence Fishburne’s involvement in the previous summer’s breakout hit Boyz n the Hood and generally tried to connect the film to the run of other so-called ‘hood movies that had made waves during that period. Although it scored positive reviews from… Read More A Scumbag for the Right Side | Deep Cover (1992) Criterion Collection Blu-ray
If not quite as satisfying (to old-school Generation 1 fans like myself, at least) as the 2018 Bumblebee prequel movie, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts works well enough in broad terms to prove that the franchise remains better off without Michael Bay at the helm. Sadly, the film continued the series’ downward trajectory at the… Read More Going Primal | Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) 4K Ultra HD
After more than a decade exploring other subjects and genres that interested him, filmmaker David Cronenberg returned to the so-called “body horror” cycle of his early career with the 1999 thriller eXistenZ. While the director himself has argued that this particular movie was more science-fiction than horror, the connective tissue (in multiple senses) with his… Read More Death to Realism | eXistenZ (1999) Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra HD
Looking at it clinically, the Amazon Prime film Role Play is essentially another made-for-TV knockoff of James Cameron’s 1994 blockbuster True Lies – as if we hadn’t already seen enough of those over the past year, both official and unofficial. Thankfully, this one has just enough of its own twists to be an enjoyable and… Read More Couple Goals | Role Play (2024) on Amazon Prime Video
Denied the opportunity to make an official Star Wars movie, director Zack Snyder tossed together his own knockoff space epic, complete with a remarkably similar story about a farmboyfarmgirl from a distant world who joins a rebel alliance to take down an evil galactic empire. In addition to other direct plot lifts and familiar recycled… Read More Seven Space Samurai | Rebel Moon: Part One (2023) on Netflix
Nostalgia is a trap that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny both comments upon and falls victim to. The fifth entry in the venerable franchise arrives fifteen years after the last one, which was itself already nineteen years after everybody already assumed that the Indiana Jones Trilogy had satisfactorily concluded. Coming so late, the… Read More Yesterday Belongs to Us | Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) 4K Ultra HD
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