Review: “The Matrix Resurrections”

“The Matrix Resurrections” opens with a moment of déjà vu: familiar music cues accompany rows of green code scrolling across the screen, followed by a phone call, and then a confrontation. If these scenes feel overly familiar, it’s because they are almost an exact recreation of the opening of Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s visionary 1999 […]

Review: “Spider-Man: No Way Home”

I wasn’t sure, especially in light of a pandemic that it seems we’ll never pull out of, if I’d ever have another theatrical experience quite on the level of “Avengers: Endgame.” I’m not a particular fan of that movie, or even the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, but there’s no denying that the conversion […]

Review: “Eternals”

“Eternals” opens in a manner that isn’t typical of any previous film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead of jumping straight into the action, an opening scroll details the mythos behind the story we are about to watch unfold. In 5000 B.C., ten super-powered beings known as the Eternals were sent to Earth by the […]

Review: “No Time to Die”

Six actors (seven, if you’d like to throw David Niven in there for the 1967 parody “Casino Royale”) have portrayed Agent 007 in the nearly 60 years since a tuxedo-clad Sean Connery first introduced himself as “Bond, James Bond” in 1962’s “Dr. No.” They’ve all come and gone over the years without a lot of […]

Review: “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” begins with what may be my favorite opening sequence of any Marvel movie to date: a thousand years ago, the warrior Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung) finds and takes control of the ten rings, a weapon that grants their user great power and immortality. As the centuries pass, […]

Review: “Free Guy”

Guy is not the kind of character you’d usually want to play in a shooter game. In fact, he’s not the kind of character you’d normally be able to play at all. Guy is a non-playable character, or NPC, a background figure created to populate a video game’s environment, whether to just provide atmosphere or […]

Review: “The Suicide Squad”

The DC Extended Universe got off to a rough start—so much so that over the last year, we’ve seen Warner Brothers attempt to course correct the DCEU, not by investing in bringing new characters and stories to life, but by tinkering with their past failures. This past spring saw the release of Zack Snyder’s four […]

Streaming Movie Reviews

Happy August to all who celebrate! Today I’m recapping some direct-to-streaming films that were released in July, including one of the year’s best movies (“Summer of Soul”) and Netflix’s very fun horror trilogy event, “Fear Street.” You can find my capsule reviews of those movies and others down below! “SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE […]

Review: “Snake Eyes”

Do you remember the “G.I. Joe” movies? I say movies, plural, because there were two of them—2009’s “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and 2013’s “G.I. Joe: Retaliation“—although it has been so long since the films based on the line of Hasbro toys was released that I can’t imagine anyone but the most diehard fans […]

Review: “Black Widow”

Regardless of your feelings on the dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the film industry, it does feel like a signal of some normalcy returning seeing an MCU film in the movie theaters for the first time since 2019’s “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” which immediately followed the franchise’s massive “Avengers: Endgame.” But what makes […]