Simon West’s Skyfire is equal parts “Jurassic Park,” “Armageddon,” and, well, “Volcano”: A tireless, heart-pounding leap beyond such niceties as logic and character development into the well-trod terrain of super-duper action movie. And by that purple prose, I mean that it’s a damn fine movie to veg out to and just enjoy for what it…
Latest on the slate from Blumhouse Productions — known for their mostly neutered horror flicks (“Unfriended: Dark Web,” “Truth or Dare,” “Happy Death Day,” to name a few of the more recent ones) — is Fantasy Island, a retooling of a campy, Aaron Spelling produced television show. And much like that late 70s to early…
When looking upon the first frame of Paradise Hills, the feature directorial debut of Spanish filmmaker Alice Waddington, your eyes are thrown into a wonderland of bizarre beauty. With a crisp sci-fi world of equal parts whimsy and despair, this feminist fairy tale has all of the looks of something remarkable, but lacks the proper…
The documentary genre has experienced a bit of a resurgence in 2018 and capitalizing on that, Netflix is swooping in at the start of the year with another original deep-dive of their own, this one concentrated on the events leading up to, making up and resulting from 2017’s Fyre Festival fiasco. And like the organizers…
A spooky seaman’s tale, The Isle screened at Norwich Film Festival in 2018 with an introduction from co-writer and director Matthew Butler-Hart. Butler-Hart describes the film as influenced by slow-burn horror of the 1970s, and he also spoke about the inspiration for the story — Eilean Shona, an island off the coast of Scotland that…
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is, for lack of a kinder way of saying it, a prehistoric mess. Nestled between a passable 2015 sequel and a bookend to the trilogy coming in 2021, it is sloppy staging for what’s sure to be an underwhelming and anticlimactic third effort. Chris Pratt (“Avengers: Infinity War”) and Bryce Dallas…
Video game movies have sucked for decades, so when a kind of good one comes along, it arrives with the benefit of basement-dwelling expectations. This could be the explanation for why Roar Uthaug’s lean, lithe reboot Tomb Raider is so clearly silly and yet strangely satisfying at the same time. Or perhaps the movie works…
