When Rise of the Planet of the Apes came out, it was met with a tidal wave of surprised praise. How did a movie starring a sleepy James Franco i- n a franchise that Tim Burton pretty solidly drove into the ground – manage to be not just bearable, but actually pretty great? Dawn of […]
… oh wait I’m sorry, the Tagline is Age of Extinction? Yes, Transformers is 165 minutes, and there were times I was hoping a dentist drill would come in a save me, but no such luck. While this film is bound to make money this weekend, I can’t help but wonder are we facing the […]
Trailer Park Boys is the show that fans constantly say goodbye to and yet they always welcome it back with open arms. At this point, the show has ended on two separate occasions and, following the true-to-form theatrical release Countdown to Liquor Day, it seemed like the boys’ adventures were ending for good. Normally, I […]
I thought a lot about the lighter side of male privilege while watching Obvious Child. As a woman obsessed with social justice (especially the particular form of social justice that populates opinion pieces on sites like Jezebel and HuffPost), I spend a lot of time thinking about privilege and it’s dark implications. This is […]
Million Dollar Arm isn’t really a movie smart, discerning people are supposed to love. It’s Disney live-action feel-good goofiness starring a beloved actor who’s being paid exorbitant amounts of money to put his good name on a silly piece of fluff (the actual acting required- at least from Jon Hamm- is minimal). But I liked […]
Sometimes, a gal likes a good sob. It’s not all the time. I’m not really a Terms of Endearment kind of gal. The thing is, my tears (like my laughs or my smiles or my shrieks of horror) come easy. Often. Occasionally brought on by a particularly pretty melody in a car commercial. […]
Centered on Angelina Jolie’s prosthetically enhanced cheekbones, Maleficent comes off a lot like its title character: all sharp angles, other worldly beauty, and angry core. The advertising remains intentionally coy: is this a dark reimagining of an already-really-dark tale? A sympathetic character study a la Wicked? Or something different? The answer, as it turns out, […]
X-Men Days of Future Past’s structure will be incredibly familiar to any comics fan. Crisscrossing around time and space, dabbling in competing continuities. These are things that anyone who’s picked up a comic in the last fifty years finds familiar, comforting, warm. The team behind the latest X-Men movie finds them warm too – they […]