Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald Is a Muddied, Incoherent Addition to the Harry Potter Universe
The problem with Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald is that it’s trying to do way too much.
Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
Murder on the Orient Express’ initial sense of fun evaporates as it leans into its investigation and (in)famous twist.
The Mummy: Tom Cruise vs The Franchise Film Bubble
The Mummy isn’t a travesty. It’s just Red Rooster, and everyone’s already at KFC or McDonalds.
Write Better Movies: Baywatch and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Either Baywatch or Dead Men Tell No Tales could have been good – well, passable – with screenplays content to be plain ol’ mediocre.
Into the Woods (2014)
Musicals and I have never really been on the same wavelength. As a child I can vividly recall watching Disney classics like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and sinking in my seat when the inevitable musical numbers began. That antipathy remains, decades later. The first film I was assigned to review…
Dead Man (1995)
Like the paper flowers that William Blake (Johnny Depp) finds absent natural scent, Dead Man is built on self-conscious artificiality. Jim Jarmusch’s neo-Western is as influenced by woodcut animation or a matinee performance of a silent-movie serial; where Sergio Leone’s post-modern approach the Western exaggerated the cinematic tropes of the genre, Jarmusch filters those conventions…
Transcendence (2014)
As we were dutifully informed before the preview screening of Transcendence, Wally Pfister not only shot this movie on film, but he also developed the film photochemically rather than digitally. This isn’t surprising for Pfister, acolyte of fervent film fetishist Christopher Nolan, but it is reflective of this cinematographer-turned-director’s old-fashioned approach to the material. Old-fashioned…
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