After nearly three weeks since my press screening, I have been secretly dreading composing a review for James Cameron’s latest production, Alita: Battle Angel. Even more so than dreading it, I was truly unsure of how to approach it, since the experience has almost completely been wiped from my memory (for the better, incidentally). But…
Arena lights are off, locker rooms are empty and primetime TV slots are dotted with holes. We don’t have to be told that explicitly in Steven Soderbergh’s (“Unsane”) confidently insightful new film High Flying Bird. Curiously empty New York City sidewalks and forlorn attitudes tell us what we need to know: Professional basketball games are…
1974. Amityville, Long Island. The DeFeo family lives in a house called “High Hopes,” although their situation is looking pretty hopeless. Twenty-somethings “Butch” (John Robinson, “Transformers”) and Dawn (Chelsea Ricketts, “More Than Enough”) live under the shadow of an abusive patriarch, Ronnie (Paul Ben-Victor, “Get Hard”), who’s apparently embroiled with some Mafia types. As the…
B-movies are a dime a dozen nowadays, thanks to the increasingly strengthening stream of easier distribution paths and the prolificacy of cut-rate digital effects solutions, so it’s tough to sift through the rubble of bargain bin trash to find any gems anymore. The label simply isn’t what it used to be, now sullied by the…
Director Peter Jackson’s body of work is extensive. He brought J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga to life in two award-winning trilogies, and his films have garnered dozens of Oscar nominations. Despite these cinematic feats, he perhaps has never helmed a project as significant as his 2018 documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. The…
For a film ostensibly about people in the throes of existential crises, the characters in Under the Eiffel Tower still make a show of enjoying life’s simple pleasures. But not even classic romantic comedy clichés, the beautiful French landscape, market day montages, plates of good food, glasses of better wine, parties al fresco, acoustic guitar…
With a title like The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot, there are only so many paths a movie can take. At some point, the titular man is going to have to kill Hitler and then he’s going to have to kill the Bigfoot. There’ll be some blanks to fill, but that’s going…
