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Movie Review: ‘Civil War’

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 16:40:28 +0000

What if. It’s a question that has intrigued storytellers and audiences alike for generations. The desire to take something known and twist it ever so slightly, to the point where elements and pieces are not immediately recognizable – or worse, things are chillingly recognizable and seemingly appropriate in their darker state. The thought of “yes, I could see something like this happening” is perhaps one of the scariest story premises out there – especially when what we’re being presented with is dark and dangerous. Such is the case with ‘Civil War,’ the new film from director Alex Garland and production studio A24. Taking place in the indeterminately-near future, the political and socio-economical divide in the United States of America has grown to the point where the country has fractured, with several states deciding to try their own hand at self-governance. A few maps shown early in the film indicate that close to 20 states may be trying to secede in various ways. Factions such as the “Florida Alliance” and the “New People’s Army” have arisen, but the two largest proponents have joined forces to create the “Western Forces,” and in a large-yet-subtle twist, it’s California and Texas, of all the […]

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Movie Review: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 21:30:18 +0000

New beginnings bring new excitement, but also new challenges. Such is the takeaway vibe I got from our advance screening of ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,’ the kickoff for Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Let’s be clear from the get-go: Marvel has been giving us entertaining, high-quality films for a long time now. Almost 25 years, across dozens of television series, along with short films and literature tie-ins… this juggernaut is no slouch. Unfortunately, every entry into the series can’t be a home run – and that’s where we need to have some “real talk” about ‘Quantumania.’ The story itself is right in line with what viewers have been given across the over-arching MCU narrative to date: things on Earth appear to be “settling in” a bit post-Blip (although, frustratingly, ‘Quantumania’ still does not reference anything to do with the giant stone Eternal that is now sticking out of the Earth, half-stuck, as shown in the climax of ‘The Eternals,’ with this new film believed to be the 11th property to take place in the MCU timeline set after those events with absolutely zero remarks or tie-ins to it). The story does reference The Blip, of course, as […]

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Movie Review: Wonder Woman 1984

Dave Taylor — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 03:04:57 +0000

I really wanted to love the new Wonder Woman movie. After all, Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is a fun and engaging character, particularly in her super-powered Wonder Woman guise. She’s a superhero with heart and compassion, quick to stop the bad guys but just as likely to help a child regain their lost soccer ball or favorite toy. The first film, 2017’s Wonder Woman, was mostly great fun with General Ludendorff (Danny Houston) a suitably epic antagonist that made for a dramatic showdown and goofy but lovable Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) as her love interest. It’s no longer World War I, however, it’s 1984 and the tail end of the Cold War. In Wonder Woman 1984 Diana is an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institute when she’s not donning her trademark outfit and zipping about DC rescuing women from being hit by speeding cars or tossed off bridges. Her new colleague Barbara Ann Minerva (Kristen Wiig) is envious of Diana’s presence, self-confidence and beauty; she’s a bit of a clumsy goof that people tend to ignore. A shipment of antiques arrives from the FBI with the request that the Smithsonian help identify the individual pieces. Chief among them is a crystal […]

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Movie Review: Don’t Look Back

Dave Taylor — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:33:01 +0000

You can be excused if you’re confused about the title of this film; there are over 100 movies on IMDb with the name Don’t Look Back! Apparently it’s a very popular name for a movie. Who knew? This 2020 film is a very contemporary horror tapped into the “Karen”-in-the-park bystander zeitgeist. It revolves around a group of people who witness an assault in New York City’s Central Park but don’t do anything about it, just look away, walk away, stand and watch or even record it with their smartphones. Not a good samaritan in the bunch. When some of these witnesses start to die, young mom Caitlin Kramer (Kourtney Bell) tries to discover the truth behind the dangerous situation before she too ends up a casualty of her ostensibly poor life decision. If you’re thinking this sounds like a variation on the sly and witty Final Destination horror film series, there’s a reason for that: those films were all written by Jeffrey Reddick, who also wrote and directed Don’t Look Back. Based on a 2014 short film called Good Samaritan the film has a solid premise: What if you stood by while someone was beaten or murdered instead of intervening […]

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Movie Review: ‘Bill And Ted Face The Music’

Jordan DesJardins — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 22:39:41 +0000

It’s been nearly three decades since we last experienced a new exploit with one of the most excellent duos in cinematic history, Bill and Ted! After all these years, Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan are back for a most resplendent new adventure through time to prevent reality from collapsing in on itself! But with all the time that has passed in between films, are the great ones still great? Would Bill & Ted have been better left in the past? Is this a most triumphant return to form, or a totally egregious misstep? ‘Bill & Ted: Face The Music’ picks up our story in almost real time, with our titular heroes dealing with the fact that they have yet to live up to the future they were promised. The band ‘Wyld Stallyns’ failed to take off in any meaningful way and is all but a memory, with the guys relegated to playing Ted’s brother’s wedding. The Princesses are fed up with waiting for things to get better and the only thing that our most righteous dudes have going well for them is that their now adult daughters adore them and are following in their footsteps (and you […]

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Movie Review: Scooby Doo or Scooby Doon’t Check Out ‘Scoob!’?

Jordan DesJardins — Sat, 16 May 2020 00:53:54 +0000

This weekend Warner Brothers has released their latest reboot of the beloved ‘Scooby Doo’ franchise with ‘Scoob!’. Originally set for a full blown theatrical release, due to the global pandemic and theaters being closed worldwide, Warner Brothers saw an opportunity to entertain the masses right in the comfort of our own homes while we try to ride out the proverbial storm by releasing ‘Scoob!’ for both purchase and rental digitally through online services including Vudu and Movies Anywhere. Let me preface this by saying that I am unabashedly a massive fan of the ‘Scooby Doo’ franchise and have been since I was old enough to pay attention to the television. When I first heard that Warner Brothers was rebooting the brand with an all new CG animated film that would retell the origins of the team, I was immediately interested. I was also very hesitant about getting my hopes up. As months went on leading up to the film’s release, we found out more and more about what was going to be included in the film; with characters from Hanna-Barbera’s back catalog including Captain Caveman, Dick Dastardly, and superhero duo Blue Falcon and Dyno-Mutt all set to make appearances. Jinkies! […]

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Review: ‘The Invisible Man’ Is A Hauntingly Good Jump-Scare Horror Film Despite Its Obvious Tropes

Dave Taylor — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 00:33:22 +0000

In the 1933 classic horror film The Invisible Man, Dr. Jack Griffin (memorably played by Claude Rains) embodies the mad scientist. He figures out a way to become completely invisible, but, as luck would have it, goes insane along the way. The film is ostensibly about this murderous wack-job of a scientist but it’s just as much a warning on the dangers of science and unfettered research. The latter is, of course, a theme that runs throughout all speculative cinema: Are we humans able to manage progress and make good decisions about the technologies we invent? Eighty seven years later we have a new horror movie with the same title, and, surprisingly, there’s an element of commonality: The invisible man is again a mad scientist, with an emphasis on “mad”. The scientist is Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and he’s kinda possessive towards his live-in girlfriend Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) – as in completely, overwhelmingly, and dangerously controlling. Late one night she escapes over the wall of his high-tech compound (curiously reminiscent of Tony Stark’s mansion in the Marvel movies) and just barely gets away, with the help of her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer). Psycho, obsessive, über-rich ex-boyfriend? If you guessed “woman in […]

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Review: ‘Sonic The Hedgehog’ Does Not Run Rings Around The Competition

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 18:14:38 +0000

If you know, then you know. You know all about the “curse of the video-game-to-movie adaptation,” where no matter how hard studios and directors and writers and actors try, no one can really seem to get a top-to-bottom good film out of a video-game property. For every ‘Resident Evil’ or ‘Mortal Kombat’ that shows promise (and geez, these are really the best of the best in this category?), there’s a deluge of crap like ‘Assassin’s Creed,’ ‘House of the Dead,’ ‘Doom,’ the list goes on and on. And yes, even you, ‘Super Mario Bros’ fans, you must admit that the 1993 movie is a dumpster fire, all nostalgia aside. If you know, then you know. You know all about ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ and the CGI foibles its main character went through during the film’s production, and the infamous decision by Paramount and director Jeff Fowler to admit that the titular blue hedgehog, in the first released trailer, looked creepy as all get-out and that they were going to commit the time and resources to redo the character’s design and get him looking right. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s that original pre-redesign trailer, in all its horrendous glory: You can’t un-see […]

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Review: ‘Birds of Prey,’ Like Harley Quinn With A Bat, Is Hit And Miss

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 08:00:50 +0000

It’s no secret that the DC films have had their ups and downs over the past few years. The House That Superman Batman Built (you’re forever my #1 guy, LEGO Batman) tried the whole “interconnected cinematic universe” thing and failed rather spectacularly at it, but the company has found larger-than-average success with leaning into what their comics are known best for: being kind of a potluck of everything, a dash of quirky here, a pinch of super-hero-ish types, a splash of violence there, mix it all up with some dark comedy and don’t take yourselves too seriously. On the heels of last year’s critically-acclaimed ‘Joker‘ comes a tale about his best-gal sidekick – oops, I mean this film is about the Gotham City-based crime-fighting trio of ladies, and a certain Clown Queen just happens to be… along for the ride to… oh, who are we kidding, this movie is a Harley Quinn film first and an “everybody else” flick second, regardless if Daddy’s Little Monster’s name doesn’t come until a ridiculous TEN words into the film’s actual title. That title officially is, for the record, ‘Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn).’ Moving forward in this […]

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Review: ‘Gretel & Hansel’ Slides Down Your Gullet With Style

Anthony Isaac Bradley — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 19:08:08 +0000

Orion Picture’s Gretel and Hansel portrays fairy tales as they should be — not far from a nightmare. Since this is a tale about kids, every adult terrifies via grotesqueness, or just by their willingness to separate from their own kin. Osgood Perkins’s (The Blackcoat’s Daughter) newest film is about consuming bad habits, and how being solitary is sometimes necessary, especially if you’re feeling witchy (and who isn’t these days). This cautionary tale shares DNA with The VVitch — it’s often a moody, dark film, lit only by lanterns in the triangle house where the leads ultimately find themselves for a spell. Despite this bleakness, Gretel & Hansel is a beautiful film to look at. The camera work alternates between static shots of odd, fall landscapes, or shakey too-close-for-comfort individual shots of the actors. Sophia Lillis (It) plays the big sister, and Samuel Leakey is the boy Hansel. Lillis has an occasional voice-over, but it’s never intrusive. I neglected to check the rating initially, which is PG-13. This does not feel like a PG-13 film. The threatening, but never over the top performance by Alice Krige (Silent Hill) as the witch isn’t kids stuff, nor are the images of various […]

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Review: ‘Color Out Of Space’ Embodies The True Spirit Of A Lovecraft Horror Story

Dave Taylor — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 15:12:16 +0000

One of the first horror writers, H.P. Lovecraft created an entire world of dark, twisted tales that featured terrifying beasts and unrelenting nightmare situations. There’s no redemption, no neat endings, just a perverse, cynical view of humanity and the greater world around us. His greatest creation was the beast Cthulhu but through his many novels and short stories, he created an entire Lovecraftian world. Miskatonic University, Dunwich, Arkham, Innsmouth, and Kingsport are all familiar to horror fans and show up in a wide variety of pop culture contexts. In Gotham City, the fictional setting for the Batman stories, criminals are sent to the Arkham Asylum, for example. Not a coincidence. There are also lots of Lovecraft-inspired movies, with varying levels of cinematic success. The best of them are dark, really dark. One of Lovecraft’s favorite stories was a short piece called “The Colour Out of Space” that he wrote for the September, 1927 edition of the fiction magazine “Amazing Stories”. Tired of benign aliens portrayed in contemporary works, he offered up a weird and cautionary tale of a meteorite crashing into the woods outside Arkham, Massachusetts and subsequently causing strange things to occur. The new Richard Stanley film “Color Out […]

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Kristen Stewart Floats Above The Horror Tropes In ‘Underwater’

Anthony Isaac Bradley — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 01:04:00 +0000

Despite the trappings of its familiar parts, Underwater is science fiction without nihilism. The movie is made up of the DNA of Blade Runner and Aliens, specifically the latter, but the humane script by Brian Duffield (Insurgent) allows the audience to hope for the character’s survival against the odds of such movie structures. Kristen Stewart stars as Nora, who works as a mechanical engineer for an underwater drilling expedition. She’s well-liked by her Captain (Vincent Cassel) and crewmates. The first telling moment of her character is when she spares a spider in the sink. “How’d you get down here?” she asks. Stewart spends most of the film pant-less, finishing the runtime with an aesthetic to make an independent pro wrestler proud: knee and elbow pads, sports bra, tiny shorts—all in black. She’s certainly a standout visual in style alone. The dive suits aren’t bad either, with lots of intricate details over a white color scheme. Underwater plays with common fears: claustrophobia, isolation, and the unknown, as any film or television episode might that borrows so heavily from Aliens. The survivors have to keep moving, though each new place they find seems worse than the last. There seems to be a […]

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‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: A Dull Ending To A Sweeping Saga

Dave Taylor — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 16:49:01 +0000

Let’s just start with the TLDR: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a good sci-fi film, but it’s not great. Yes, they manage to wrap up a lot of the storylines left unfinished in the sprawling series that started way back in 1977 with Star Wars: A New Hope, but between trying to offer a neat ending and weaving in endless fan-favorite characters, lines, and scenes, the overall film ends up a bit dull. Like so many science fiction fans, I grew up with Star Wars and can still remember the opening scene of the first film at our local Southern California cineplex. I was so blown away and loved it so much that I immediately went and saw it again at the great Cinerama Dome theater in downtown Los Angeles. A sprawling space Western, the Star Wars universe gave us so many great characters, from the impulsive young Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and his sister Leia (Carrie Fisher) to the loveable rogue Han Solo (Harrison Ford), mysterious Obi-Wan (Alec Guinness), incomprehensible Chewbacca, C3PO, and R2D2. Then so many other characters joined the narrative as the sequence confusingly went from Episodes 4, 5 and 6 to Episodes 1, 2, […]

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Movie Review: ‘Little Joe’ Drags In This Horticulture Horror Film

Dave Taylor — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 23:39:44 +0000

What if you woke up and your friends, family, and neighbors had been replaced by replicas that looked the same but exhibited behavioral oddities? This question has fueled countless sci-fi stories, from classics like the brilliant and paranoid Invasion of the Body Snatchers (watch the 1956 original, the 1978 remake misses the point of the story) to Blade Runner, where the replicants are “more human than human” (is Deckard a replicant or not?) to the terrific HBO series Westworld. In The Stepford Wives (1974) the replacement wives are intended to make the men’s lives better (creepy AF but that’s why the premise is so strong). In John Carpenter’s 1982 remake The Thing the alien can shape-shift and replace anyone stuck in the Antarctic research base. Underlying it all is the basic question Are you who I think you are? The latest movie to wrestle with this is a moody Euro sci-fi thriller called Little Joe and it’s surprisingly effective, albeit paced so slowly that you might have to resist the urge to fast forward now and then. Or just succumb to the siren song of the plant’s happiness pollen… Driven single mother Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) is a plant breeder at […]

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Movie Review: ‘Doctor Sleep’

Tony Schaab - Senior Editor — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 19:35:20 +0000

Being a “professional critic” is a tricky thing. Movies, TV shows, games, books, music – these are all works of art the “speak” to people in different ways; having someone tell you how you should feel about them, then, is a bit of an oxymoron. In my experience, the best critics don’t try to push their agenda or their feelings on you (even though they may share those thoughts with you a little bit) – rather, they try and provide insight and information in a way that might help you learn more about the piece of media being discussed, and whether or not you might (or might not) want to partake of said piece of media. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, to be sure; a dangerous thing, in my mind, is a critic with a loud negative opinion. There are ways to be critical of something without being rude, condescending, or mean-spirited about it. At our press screening for ‘Doctor Sleep,’ I sat near another critic in the press section of the theater who was harumph-ing often through the film – starting at the opening first few notes of the intro song of the movie, no less – and during […]

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