The Edge, much to my pleasure, is a hard movie to classify. It’s a survival adventure but not a survival adventure, a killer-animal flick and not a killer-animal flick, a two-hander yet not a two-hander. It skirts that rare line of mass entertainment and highbrow drama, chiefly thanks to David Mamet’s sly script, which never sacrifices smarts for action – or vice versa. Continue reading
As an avid fan of killer-animal movies, one thing I’ve learned is that they are shockingly easy to fuck up. For every Deep Blue Sea there are a dozen Shark Nights, for every Alligator countless Primevals. But within the pantheon of trashy creature features, my favorite has to be Anaconda. The movie has never enjoyed the warmest of receptions – its critical response was mixed at best, and it’s often used as a bad-movie punchline – and it’s not hard to see why. It’s unapologetically cheesy, old-fashioned, and lowbrow. But I believe that Anaconda’s true intended audience is the die-hard fans of its genre, and for those of us in that group it’s an absolute corker. Continue reading
As others have observed, the overall trend of Pixar’s releases has been a gradual decline in creativity, with the freshness of Toy Story giving way to the banal likes of Cars and Inside Out. The conceit of Onward is on the trite end of the spectrum; its serviceable and shallow fantasy-creatures-meet-modern-technology setup feels like it could have come from any one of Hollywood’s anonymous computer animation factories. Continue reading
There’s a shot early on in Aquaman that sums up the movie better than any review could. Preparing for battle, an underwater cavalry unit enters formation, each soldier mounted astride a bus-sized great white shark. One of the massive beasts, restrained by its rider, thrashes its head and roars. It’s a moment that perfectly encapsulates the movie’s attitude: you’re either on board for all of this lunacy or none of it. For me, the decision was easy. Continue reading
Annihilation is a hard movie to categorize; not because defies genre categories, but because it samples so many of them. Like the strange creatures that inhabit its world, it’s a hybrid; blending together science-fiction, drama, and horror to potent effect. The structure of its first-act setup is pure adventure, beginning with the return of Lena’s (Natalie Portman) husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) long after he went missing on a classified government mission. It’s immediately clear that something is very wrong with him, both physically and mentally. When Lena tries to get her husband to the hospital, the government swoops in and abducts them both to a secret location, where they isolate her and reveal what’s responsible for his condition. Continue reading