Critic Robert Brian Taylor calls these movies part of “The Sad Action Hero canon.” Chris Hemsworth is its most notable new member. He plays Tyler Rake—a young boy’s idea for an action hero name, but Hemsworth makes him seem almost like a real person. He’s a tremendous physical actor, possibly as good as Schwarzenegger and … Read more
Recent complaints from frustrated employees of Marvel’s visual effects studios make it easier to understand why an SFX-driven event title like “Adipurush” could cost so much and still look so bad. It’s harder to understand how the makers of this movie could be satisfied with key establishing scenes, like when Janaki swoons as she and … Read more
I never lost my love for Superman, but I was thrilled by this new world that felt deliciously subversive and somehow accessible. I won’t say our son Ben was named after the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm, but I won’t say he wasn’t. Fantastic Four. X-Men. Spiderman. Thor. Black Panther. Iron Man. The Hulk. They are … Read more
The human drama of the Asteroid City portion of the film, which finds Augie, his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks), and the Steenback children, among others, negotiating with awful grievance, is interrupted by not one but two visitations by an alien spacecraft. The new knowledge of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe solves nobody’s problems—it just … Read more
The latest season of the sci-fi anthology series features three decent entries and two brilliant ones. Plot: Expect the unexpected. The long-awaited return of Charlie Brooker’s dark, satirical anthology series which reinvents itself with each new episode. The sixth season of black-mirror is the most unpredictable, unclassifiable and unexpected yet. The series is created and … Read more
Like its namesake monsters, The Walking Dead is the show that won’t die. It keeps going—it gets revived, renewed, resurrected. The show’s first revival, The Walking Dead: Dead City brings back two favorite characters, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and sends them to Manhattan. Set an indeterminate time after the end of … Read more
There is a long tradition of stories about parental issues in feature animation, dating all the way back to the earliest days of Walt Disney’s studio. Back then, the movies were mostly about children grappling with trauma inflicted by (or stemming from a separation from) their moms: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Dumbo, … Read more
Jay Moore (Micah Stock) is a small-town idiot running a dumb scam on his employers and customers at a sub sandwich shop. Instead of ordering the corporate-mandated supplies from the company that owns the chain, he gets expired products from a local grocery store for cheap. A higher markup means more profit, but the deal … Read more
Medical professionals would usually advise parents of intersex children that they were better off raising their offspring as a “boy” or a “girl” to make things easier on the child and their family. Whose ease was really being prioritized, though? Not that of the children, who would then have to spend most of their youth, … Read more
“Mending the Line” opens in Afghanistan, as a group of Marines, celebrating their final day of deployment, are sent out for one last patrol by their leader, Colter (Walls). Things go haywire. Many of the men under his command, including good friends, are killed, and Colter is severely injured. Back home, haunted by guilt and … Read more