Screen
Right story, wrong script
Red Tails squanders a great subject, reducing the real-life struggles and fierce heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen to rickety cliché. Some of the action is fun. But if something about that statement doesn’t sound right, well, there’s your chief problem with Red Tails. ...
Bon appétit
It all starts so innocently: the invitation to a sleepover. The invited wants to go, but her father won’t let her. Not in a...
Forgettable
If you’ve ever seen an online profile picture, chances are you’re familiar with the pursed-lips, craned-neck, supposedly slimming contortion known affectionately as “the duckface.” Total Recall is the sci-fi tale of a quasi-postapocalyptic duckface war between Kate ...
2020 in movies
2020 was the year I watched more but understood less. With a rotating series of crises to consider, rare were the instances where I...
Hot dino-on-dino action
Hand a kid two dinosaur toys. Said kid will not use them to contemplate evolutionary biology. Said kid will smash the two of them together, simulating an epic dino-smackdown while emitting a likely annoying reptilian howl. Jurassic World is that but with a $150 ...
Cons, vexing
Despite its title and the fact that Will Smith continually mouth-dumps exposition about how pulling a con requires attention to detail, Focus is hella sloppy. It’s not just that genuinely thrilling “who’s playing who” moments bump up against a holistically ...
We’ve always been this dirty
Not unlike the year 2016 in politics, writer/director Dee Rees’ adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound, starts off as a slow, plodding look at...
Cage shines as corrupt New Orleans cop
"Anything’s possible in this storm!” says the man with the badge in Werner Herzog’s delirious Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year. It’s a very loose remake of 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, in which ...
Jacko, through the eyes of his estate
How much of Michael Jackson’s This Is It can we believe...
