Search for 2021

Does anyone remember the 2002 animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron? I didn’t either until I looked it up. That nearly-two decades old hand-drawn movie provided the basis for the apparently popular Netflix series Spirit Riding Free ...

Three years (and seemingly another lifetime) ago, the release of Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a documentary about the defunct TV series “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” struck a powerfully nostalgic chord with Gen-Xers and Millennials. The sim...

With The Suicide Squad, James Gunn becomes the second high-profile Marvel director to moonlight in the DCEU. Fortunately, Gunn’s effort is significantly better than Joss Whedon’s career-killing turn with Justice League. Gunn, temporarily fi...

Those Who Wish Me Dead is the kind of straightforward thriller that was popular during the 1990s – the sort of thing that, had it come out 25 years ago, might have featured someone like Mel Gibson in the lead role. It’s a story of survival...

They have outdone themselves. The husband-and-wife duo of writer/director Ben Falcone and actress Melissa McCarthy, responsible for four previous exercises in brain cell-killing cinematic torture (Tammy, The Boss, Superintelligence, and the cr...

What a year 2021 has been for Lin-Manuel Miranda. In addition to having one of his stage plays (In the Heights) transformed into a movie, he has also enjoyed major involvements in two animated films (Vivo for Netflix and Encanto for Disney) and ma...

I’m tempted to call Together Together a romantic comedy because it has some of the rhythms one commonly associates with the genre. However, that would be mislabeling Nikole Beckwith’s sophomore film. Although there is love and affection in...

Many movies would like to be grouped with the likes of The Terminator, Alien, and Predator. However, although aspects of The Tomorrow War recall those films, they often feel more like a distant echo than a new chorus. This 2021 movie uses relia...

A wonderful thing about Shakespeare’s canon is that those plays can form the vehicles by which any director’s unique vision can emerge. Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Kenneth Branagh all recognized this. With The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel ...

If 2018’s Venom felt like an afterthought, then the sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, feels like an afterthought to an afterthought. With its short running length, this drunk-on-CGI production is less a movie and more the outline of somet...