Review: “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”

“Do you have what it takes to make it epic?” Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) asks this question of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) toward the end of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. But it might just as well be a challenge offered to director George Miller. To say that Miller’s 2015 action movie Mad Max: Fury Road came […]

Review: “The Fall Guy”

It started at the Oscars. When Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt teamed up to present a salute to the stunt community at this year’s Academy Awards (an odd bit of promotion considering that no Oscar for stunt work currently exists and there’s no evidence of it coming on the horizon), their playful ribbing of each […]

Review: “Monkey Man”

That Dev Patel’s Monkey Man— not only the actor’s directorial debut, but his brainchild, having also conceived the story, co-written the screenplay, and produced it in addition to starring in it— would be compared to the John Wick series was inevitable, even if all they share in common is their centering on a lone man […]

Review: “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire”

Any new Godzilla movie always has my expectations working somewhat against it. My younger brother watched and rewatched Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla so many times after it was released— almost daily— I’m surprised he didn’t ruin the VHS tape. But he also went back and watched several of Toho Co.’s original films (albeit the horribly […]

Review: “Road House” (2024)

If there’s one thing Rowdy Herrington’s 1989 sleaze-fest Road House understood, it was how best to utilize Patrick Swayze’s appeal as an object of desire. The morning after Swayze’s cool bouncer James Dalton blows into town, having taken a job at a rough-and-tumble bar called the Double Deuce in Jasper, Missouri (a tiny town that […]

Review: “Argylle”

“This was our song,” a man murmurs to a woman as they tenderly sway to the music across the dance floor. The song in question is “Now and Then,” a “new” song by the “Beatles” that was released in November 2023— nearly two years after principal photography wrapped on Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle. The song, in […]

Review: “Expend4bles”

Generally poorly executed in story, dialogue, and action, the one pure pleasure the Expendables series had to offer was the joy of watching aging 80s action legends like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Willis appearing together on screen, quoting their iconic lines back-and-forth to one another in bouts of fan service banter […]

Review: “Blue Beetle”

A bright young man unexpectedly binds with a mutant insect that grants him superhuman abilities and makes him a target of some bad people who would rather weaponize his powers. That sounds like I’m recounting the origins of the seemingly never-ending series of Spider-man movies, but it’s actually the premise of Blue Beetle, the newest […]

Review: “Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One”

Tom Cruise is the 21st century’s Buster Keaton. That Cruise is one of the last true movie stars is certain: his name— and his outspoken devotion to cinema— alone drives audiences to movie theaters in droves, despite his often unsavory personal life that typically draws more fascination than ridicule. That first statement might provoke more […]

Review: “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”

Indiana Jones has always been about the past. He is an archaeologist, after all, and his exploits, from the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark to the titular artifact of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, have always married the past with his present day, typically with a supernatural twist. But the […]