The world’s longest-running film franchise goes off the rails a bit. The original Godzilla (1954) was a straightforward metaphor for the horrors of nuclear war. In contrast, this iteration, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, tries to be too many things to too many people—a disaster movie, a horror movie, and a human-interest drama, with a […]
Review: Just a Breath Away (Dans la brume) (2018)
This rare French entry asks a little too much of its viewers. First off, people with respiratory issues shouldn’t see this movie. I was very conscious of my breathing during and after watching it. Now then: A divorced dad, Mathieu, returns home to Paris from an ostensible business trip to Canada. In reality, he’s been […]
Review: The Wandering Earth (2019)
What better theme than hope, for a movie that features and was released on the Chinese lunar New Year (Spring Festival)? In The Wandering Earth, our story opens with a New Year’s festival winding its way through the “streets” of an underground Beijing. Why is the city underground? OK, follow me on this one: The […]
Review: The Meg, or the Continued Evolution of Jason Statham
Just keep swimming, just keep swimming… Jason Statham started his career playing hard-as-nails tough guys in movies like Crank (2006) and The Expendables series. He became so identified with that persona that he was able to (brilliantly) spoof it in Spy (2015), where we first saw his comedic chops. Then came The Fate of the Furious […]
Review: The Crew (Ekipazh) (2018)
Maybe it’s an “everywhere except America” phenomenon: disaster movies that are developed as dramas, not just spectacle. The Crew (Ekipazh), like 2015’s Bølgen (The Wave, Norway), has competence porn to spare, characters you can root for, a restrained yet evocative score, and a tense storyline. It all adds up to one of the best disaster […]