2018’s “A Quiet Place” is a terrifically focused and tightly wound horror film, which uses silence interspersed with jump scares to create a thoroughly thrilling experience. How then to follow it up with a “Part II?” Writer-director John Krasinski does so by expanding the world of the first film while also maintaining the focus on…
Gone are the days of 1970s-style “Jiggle TV” . . . you know, that endearing media term reserved for the boob-tube, pop-cultural guilty pleasure that the late mega-television producer Aaron Spelling eagerly supplied to prime time viewers? With it, the ABC network struck a goldmine with the curvy, cops-turned-private investigators from the Townsend Agency in…
The special forces sub-genre combines elements of the cop, spy and soldier film, and is characterized by jargon, hardware, institutionalized yet independent characters and almost-but-not-quite overwhelming odds. Notable examples include “Tears of the Sun,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Triple Frontier” and “The Expendables” franchise. Given their practice of taking established generic traditions and infusing them with…
Skrulls. Kree. Oh my! Earth being stuck in the middle of two alien races doing battle is bad, but adding Ronan the Destroyer (remember him from “Guardians of the Galaxy”?) into the mix makes the situation even worse. Luckily, we have Captain Marvel around to keep the fray from causing our untimely destruction. The film,…
As Arthurian films have gone in recent years, the most epic in my opinion is probably “Excalibur” from 1981; the most interesting one is the 1995 Richard Gere vehicle, “First Knight”; the most fun was the 1963 animated “The Sword in the Stone”; while the best is easily 1975’s classic, “Monty Python and the Holy…
With The Legend of Tarzan, Tarzan meets the cast of “Planet of the Apes” and no one comes out looking good. To this reporter’s count, there have been more than 30 screen adaptations of the semi-classic Edgar Rice Burroughs tale of “Tarzan, King of the Apes,” from the first appearance in 1918 (with silent star…
Once upon a time, back in the Light Ages of Hollywood genre filmmaking (aka the 80s), the ancient fantasy picture was a thing of popular beauty. They weren’t all classics, but the memorable likes of “Conan the Barbarian,” “The Beastmaster,” “Willow,” “The Princess Bride,” “Legend,” “The Neverending Story,” “Dragonslayer,” “The Last Unicorn,” and “The Dark…
