Detroit is about one of the more unpleasant things to have happened in a city where so many unpleasant things have happened that you can elicit a feeling of despair just by naming your movie after it. (“Wanna go see Detroit?” “No, that sounds depressing.”) Directed with well-placed outrage by Kathryn Bigelow from a screenplay by
To the extent that there are James Bonds in the real world — dashing, highly skilled secret agents who can kill enemies with a rolled-up newspaper — surely by now there are also Jane Bonds. Yet Hollywood has offered few lady spies worthy of the comparison, leaving a void now filled by Atomic Blonde, a
One of the music cues Donald Trump used during his presidential campaign was from the soundtrack for Air Force One, a movie in which America’s core institutions are taken over by a man whose only loyalty is to Russia. There’s also a point in the movie when the clear best choice is to overrule the president’s
Going to the movies can be overwhelming these days, in whatever year this is. There are so many choices! This weekend alone there are three big films opening in wide release: Christopher Nolan’s World War II drama Dunkirk; Luc Besson’s space fantasy adventure Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets; and Malcolm D. Lee’s
With Dunkirk, writer-director Christopher Nolan, most famous for his Batman trilogy but even better at mind-benders like Memento and Inception, applies his cerebral skillset to another familiar genre: the World War II movie. Rather than turn the true story into a puzzle, Nolan keeps the plot simple and delivers an intense, carefully calibrated mini-epic about surviving
There isn’t much battle action in War for the Planet of the Apes, but it still feels like a war movie — a World War II movie, specifically, set largely in a wintry prison camp, with some captives collaborating with the enemy in the vain hope of postponing their own deaths while others make escape
Some superhero movies have subtitles referring to the dramatic events or villains featured therein: Apocalypse, The Age of Ultron, Civil War, The Last Stand. Then there’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, which refers to a dance at Peter Parker’s high school. Yes, the new incarnation of the web-slinger is a scrawny 15-year-old who’s at least as concerned about
Admittedly, Baby Driver employs a gimmick. Written and directed by the impossibly clever Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), the film’s main character is a getaway driver who times his crew’s bank robberies to be in sync with his iPod, which has an eclectic playlist of pop/rock songs that are heard not just
Pixar’s first bad movie, Cars 2, erred in making Mater the tow truck the main character and in emphasizing a tired espionage caper over jokes. Pixar’s second bad movie, Cars 3, fixes those mistakes and replaces them with different ones. This time, the accursed Mater is hardly around at all (and the film seems apologetic
Sometimes you see a movie and think, “How did this get made?” Fortunately, we have listening devices planted in the offices of every major Hollywood studio — a must for any serious entertainment journalist — and are able to bring you the behind-the-scenes story until the court order arrives. . The Pitch Meeting for The Mummy
