Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t going to change your life. It’s probably not necessary to clarify that, but I thought it was worth noting in the wake of the torrent of #MadMadFuryRoad hype and hyperbole that has consumed Twitter regarding George Miller’s long-(long)-awaited follow-up to his original Mad Max trilogy. Believe the hype, but don’t…

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes rejects the modern blockbuster’s inclination towards weightlessness; for a film about super-intelligent monkeys, this is a surprisingly heavy picture. While its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011), half-heartedly feinted at social resonance before shrugging and descending into frivolity, Dawn unapologetically bears the burden…

Godzilla (featured image)

Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla is an anti-blockbuster, repurposing and reinventing the grammar of big budget disaster films to produce a film that is aesthetically and ideologically compelling, if inconsistently entertaining. A dense evocation of the tragic scale of environmental and nuclear cataclysms, the film’s steadfast refusal to focus on its human characters, instead contemplating global devastation, is hardly…

Pacific Rim (2013)

Guillermo del Toro usually brings his own unique designs to blockbuster filmmaking; Pacific Rim, surprisingly, feels more like a pastiche. It’s visually a hodge-podge of Godzilla, Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Matrix sequels, and is filled with overt references – there’s a Star Wars quote, and GLaDOS from Portal voices the film’s computers. The lack…