Search for 2018

It’s the early 1990s and Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is already well past her sell-by date. An author specializing in biographies (she once landed on the New York Times bestseller list for one she wrote about game show panelist Dorothy Kil...

The decision to release The Cloverfield Project direct-to-streaming (DTS?) is not only a glimpse of how the future may look for middle-budget movies but a win-win for Paramount Pictures and Netflix. The studio has found a way to offload a whit...

From its pristine black-and-white cinematography to the austere hopelessness of its doomed love story, Cold War is indeed cold. Set against the backdrop of Europe between 1949 and 1964, the movie details a romance as bleak as the surroundings. ...

Colette, a U.S./U.K. collaborative bio-pic from director Wash Westmoreland (The Fluffer), presents a chronology of the celebrated French author during her Belle Epoque formative years. Transpiring across a span of nearly 20 years, the movie fa...

It started ten years ago in 2008. Call it the “Liam Neeson Action Hero First Quarter Movie.” With Taken, Pierre Morel and Luc Besson tried an experiment: put a suave, respected actor in a B-grade action movie and see how audiences reacted....

On the surface, Crazy Rich Asians and Sex and the City couldn’t be more different but, if you dig deep enough into their respective DNA’s, there’s a common thread: the love of conspicuous consumption. Heard the term “First World probl...

Creed II, the follow-up to 2015’s surprisingly successful Creed, runs afoul of a common problem to plague unplanned sequels: the need to match audience expectations trumps all other concerns, including creative latitude. The eighth installment...

Call it The Golden Compass rule: No multi-part movie series should be started without a reasonable certainty that the story will be told in full. And, although The Golden Compass’ planned sequels were the first recent films to fall afoul of t...

Two years after its release, the impressions that linger about the original Deadpool are its snarkiness and audacity. The story itself is hard to recall, in large part because it was one of the least impressive aspects of a production that was...

It’s fair to ask what new things Eli Roth and Bruce Willis bring to Death Wish that the original, made in 1974 with Charles Bronson, didn’t have. The answer is: not many. Rather than using this as an opportunity to provide a deeper dive in...