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
The new Netflix film Leave the World Behind presents a vision of the apocalypse perhaps a little more disturbingly plausible than most. It has no zombies, alien invasions, giant monsters, asteroid collisions, or coordinated global fungal pandemics. Instead, the movie shows how rapidly modern civilization will crumble when… shudder to even consider the possibility… the… Read More No Going Back to Normal | Leave the World Behind (2023) on Netflix
Before leaving his native Hong Kong, John Woo had already established an international reputation as one of the most exciting action film directors in world cinema. Naturally, Hollywood eventually came calling, luring him westward with the promise of bigger projects and bigger paydays. It would take a few attempts to get there. First, he’d make… Read More The Most Van Dammerous Game | Hard Target (1993) 4K Ultra HD
The corporate zeal to turn every piece of remotely valuable I.P. into a shared cinematic universe will eventually have to hit a tipping point where the gambit simply no longer works anymore. I’m not sure that we’ve gotten there yet, but I think we’re close. The latest in the cycle comes with the premiere of… Read More Godzilla without Much Godzilla | Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023) Apple TV+ Series Premiere
Following a brief and frankly uneventful theatrical release a few weeks ago, the latest feature from acclaimed filmmaker David Fincher arrives at what was always intended to be its true home on Netflix. Based on a French graphic novel series from 1998 that the director had been circling for adaptation at least as far back… Read More Stick to the Plan | The Killer (2023) on Netflix
Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller novel by author Anthony Doerr, the new four-episode limited series All the Light We Cannot See is a prestige production with all the high-gloss production values a hefty Netflix budget can buy. It’s also completely ridiculous, to a frankly laughable degree. I suppose that’s what you get when you… Read More Hysterical Blindness | All the Light We Cannot See (2023) Netflix Limited Series
Based on a 2014 graphic novel published by DC Vertigo, Bodies has the type of intriguing high-concept premise that feels like it almost must have been written for the express purpose of being adapted into a Netflix limited series. At least, the Netflix limited series adaptation of it sure gives that impression. Some cursory research… Read More Know You Are Loved | Bodies (2023) Netflix Limited Series
For his latest cinematic interrogation, Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris (The Fog of War) trains his cameras onto David Cornwell, better known to fans and the public at large by his pen name, John le Carré. Over a sixty-year career, the acclaimed author published dozens of hugely popular and influential novels, mostly in the espionage genre.… Read More A Perfect Spy Novelist | The Pigeon Tunnel (2023) on Apple TV+
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