Rack ’em Up and Knock ’em Down | Masters of the Air (2024) Apple TV+ Series Premiere

Nearly twenty-three years after their seminal HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, and thirteen since its follow-up The Pacific, producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks return once more to the battlegrounds of World War II to deliver the (presumed) finale to what turns out to be a very prolonged trilogy. Produced this time for Apple TV+… Read More Rack ’em Up and Knock ’em Down | Masters of the Air (2024) Apple TV+ Series Premiere

Couple Goals | Role Play (2024) on Amazon Prime Video

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

Seven Space Samurai | Rebel Moon: Part One (2023) on Netflix

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

Yesterday Belongs to Us | Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) 4K Ultra HD

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

A Happy Chicken Is a Tasty Chicken | Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) on Netflix

How long does a chicken live, anyway? According to Google, five to ten years. Yet here we are more than two decades since Aardman Animations released Chicken Run to theaters in 2000 and along comes a belated direct-to-Netflix sequel featuring almost all the original characters, if not all the original cast. Does this old bird… Read More A Happy Chicken Is a Tasty Chicken | Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) on Netflix

No Going Back to Normal | Leave the World Behind (2023) on Netflix

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

Godzilla without Much Godzilla | Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023) Apple TV+ Series Premiere

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

Hysterical Blindness | All the Light We Cannot See (2023) Netflix Limited Series

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

Know You Are Loved | Bodies (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

A Perfect Spy Novelist | The Pigeon Tunnel (2023) on Apple TV+

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+