By 1991, director Wes Craven had lived several lives. Over the course of 20 years, the college professor-turned-horror-auteur evolved from the grindhouse provocateur to the 80s slasher hitmaker behind the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Still several years from leading the meta-horror renaissance with Scream, Wes Craven released a movie that defies easy categorization. Parts dark…
The tensest moments in Straight Outta Compton are the moments when a police car cruises through the frame; the ones where red and blue lights flash in the background of a shot, growing closer and closer. Every time a cop car shows up, it’s only a matter of time until the members of N.W.A. are shoved to the…
The thing to keep in mind before going in to Trainwreck is that, at it’s core, it is still a romantic comedy. In fact, that might be the key to its success. The moments that have been codified as the modern romantic comedy (or chick flick, if you’re into gendering movies/ kind of suck), the meet-cute, the…
The major complaint leveled at the current crop of Marvel movies (aside from a tendency towards shallow villains and the overstuffing of movies with set-ups for other movies), is about the large, city smashing, collateral damaging stakes of the exploits. While Daredevil and Age of Ultron addressed that first issue, Ant-Man feels like a movie made squarely to challenge that last…
Around these parts, I tend to write a lot about video game documentaries when the fancy strikes*. This is because while we have yet to see a truly excellent movie based on a video game (though I haven’t given up hope), recent years have given us a slew of documentaries that capture excellent snapshots of…
There is something undeniably appealing about 80s pop culture. Putting aside, for a moment, the complicated sociopolitical landscape of the 1980s, it is a decade that has been embraced purely on the level its cultural output. It’s easy to understand why: so much of it is the epitome of awesome, or at least of awesome…
I was sold on Tomorrowland from the start. Something about the combination of “Brad Bird” and “big budget sci-fi project” sets me into a frothy, nerdy glee. Surely, this would be big, star-reaching sci-fi. Unfortunately, Tomorrowland felt less like that film and much more like an infomercial for it. The plot: After being released from a prison cell…
