For all the Marvel movies’ successes – great team dynamics, zippy scripts, solid action – they’ve always had a problem coming up with compelling villains (Tom Hiddleston’s Loki excepted). Captain America: Civil War devises a simple solution: pit the heroes against each other. (more…)
Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele collectively pushed forward sketch comedy with their hit TV show Key and Peele that ended in 2015 after five strong seasons. They tackled subjects as varied as race, substitute teachers and endless pop culture ephemera (Mr. T PSA anyone?) in a format that seemed rooted in the pair’s deep love of cinema and their ability to construct pitch-perfect parodies of those movies they adored. (more…)
Shane Black’s carved out quite the niche for himself in Hollywood. The prolific writer and sometimes director seems to easily oscillate between big budget spectacle (2013’s Iron Man 3 and the upcoming new Predator movie) and more personal, nuanced fare (2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys) while ensuring his sardonic wit is intact. (more…)
Taking its title (and punctuation) from a Van Halen song and billed as a spiritual sequel to the era-defining Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! promises at the very least a good time and possibly something more as it charts a few days in the lives of some college baseball players. (more…)
The danger and peril of Rudyard Kipling’s novels are combined with the iconic story from Disney’s 1967 animated version to created a vivid hybrid vision of The Jungle Book – one that was filmed entirely on sound stages in downtown L.A. (more…)
Director Jeff Nichols set himself a high bar to clear with 2012’s Mud, a movie that kickstarted the modern McConaissance while being a thrilling coming-of-age story. Mud‘s modern-day spin on Tom Sawyer ending up being one of my favourite movies of the past few years and rebooted Matthew McConaughey’s career in the process, announcing a great talent in Nichols. (more…)
A post 9/11 reactionary screed, a relentlessly grim superhero dust-up, an ad for the next 5 years’ worth of DC movies – the ungainly titled Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is all of these things and more, resulting in one of the weirdest and most off-putting blockbusters to escape the modern studio system in years. (more…)
Geek overlord J.J. Abrams (shepherd of both the recent Star Trek and Star Wars revivals) gave a famous Ted Talk a few years ago which laid bare his storytelling ethos. Abrams asserts that a movie theatre is a “mystery box” where the infinite promise and hope of storytelling live, and the best way to experience that magic is to go in cold knowing as little as possible. (more…)
A Puritan family battles possibly paranormal forces in The Witch, a movie The Satanic Temple recently called “an official Satanic experience” and a harbinger of “a new Satanic era.” (more…)
Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt re-team with their 50/50 writer-director Jonathan Levine for some drug-fueled holiday debauchery in The Night Before, a shaggy take on the tried-and-true A Christmas Carol template that injects some irreverence (and illicit substances) into a yuletide tale. (more…)
Glen On Film 