Search for Matthew

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates exemplifies what passes for “raunchy comedy” these days: plenty of vulgarity and profanity without many accompanying laughs. In trying to push the R-rated envelope, filmmakers have become so focused on bei...

Director Kyle Balda has been with the Minions since their inception. He began working in the art department for Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2, then moved to the (co-)director’s chair for Minions and Despicable Me 3. If nothing else, that assur...

Recently, Spike Lee was in the news feuding with Clint Eastwood about the absence of black servicemen in Eastwood's recent Iwo Jima duology. According to Lee, Eastwood ignored history in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima by not making...

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, adapted from Ransom Riggs’ popular YA novel, offers a different flavor of teen-oriented fantasy. A mash-up of X-Men-influenced superhero material and more traditional fantasy elements (with tim...

Money Monster wants to be more than just another mindless thriller. By building its foundation on a message about the dangers of playing the stock market roulette wheel, it seeks to inject substance into a genre overrun by action-driven popcorn films...

Kudos to Darren Aronofsky for having the courage to make this film. Kudos to Paramount Pictures for having the guts to open this wide rather than burying it or hiding it as a VOD release. It’s too bad it doesn’t work.With mother!, Aronofs...

It has been a number of years since I have read the story of Noah in "Genesis" but I'm reasonably certain there are some discrepancies between the canonical account and the one related by director Darren Aronofsky in his new movie, Noah. For exampl...

Since this is a thriller, there must be a twist. One goes into a movie like The Number 23 with this expectation. However, not only is the twist telegraphed early but it is presented in a clumsy and unconvincing manner. Other films have employed ...

Spoilers for those who don’t know much about history.Operating Finale is an historically-based thriller that follows a group of Nazi hunters as they identify, stalk, capture, and debrief Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) in Argentina during 196...

Ava DuVernay’s Origin functions both as a bio-pic of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson and an exploration of the philosophy underlying her best-selling book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Although the movie has a narrative ...