Two beautiful people in a beautiful setting confess the beauty they see in each other, before creating something beautiful between them. There’s a lot of beauty in this scene, a scene that could happen in any number of films, but here it takes place in an entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Its presence…
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…
Mary Queen of Scots, Josie Rourke’s interpretation of rival queens in the 16th century is stilted and anticlimactic, with poor pacing and a weak screenplay that casts a rather conspicuous shadow over its two prominent leads, Saoirse Ronan (“Lady Bird”) and Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”). Rourke, long affiliated with the London stage (she’s the artistic…
You don’t need to be rich or Asian to enjoy this film, but it helps if you are crazy. Unless you sneaked aboard NASA’s InSight Lander, you may have heard that John M. Chu’s (“Now You See Me 2”) satirical Crazy Rich Asians is the first Hollywood film since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club” to…
One of the main aims of a whodunnit mystery movie is to ensure that the audience doesn’t guess who done it, so by that metric, London Fields misses its mark entirely. It’s the rare movie that plays its cards so early that anyone paying even a sliver of attention during the first two minutes can…
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,…
