If Prime Video’s “The Boys‘” slow submission to superhero franchising’s demands over the course of its four years on streaming has left your stomach roiling, slam a shot of Pepto-Bismol and relax; it’s part of the routine. Superhero projects are nothing if not designed for easy spin-offs, an expectation codified in contemporary television and movies 10 years ago when “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” premiered on ABC and initiated the second phase of superhero Content™’s ruthless campaign against all other extant forms of visual storytelling.

Continue reading ‘Gen V’ Review: Amazon’s Super-Youth Rebellion Stalls Over Franchise Demands at The Playlist.

Within the first five minutes of “In Seldon’s Shadow,” the second season premiere of Apple TV+’s high-concept sci-fi colossus “Foundation,” Emperor Cleon XVII (Lee Pace), monarch of the Galactic Empire, is caught in flagrante delicto with his majordomo, Eto Demerzel (Laura Birn), by assassins, and takes a page out of Michael Davis’ “Shoot ‘Em Up” in response: He massacres them in his birthday suit. 

Continue reading ‘Foundation’ Review: Apple TV+’s Sci-Fi Colossus Gains New Immediacy, Plus Lee Pace’s Abs, In A Strong Season 2 at The Playlist.

On May 8th, avid stargazers eyeballing the cosmos were treated to a rare spectacle: the sight of a network reboot flaming out. CBS’s astonishingly ill-conceived adaptation of James Cameron’s “True Lies” premiered in March, concluded last week, and was unceremoniously canceled before the finale aired; “steady but low” isn’t the viewership the company hoped for. That’s what happens when you repackage IP without the people who made it a success, and bank on audience nostalgia for the title instead of the cast. 

Continue reading ‘FUBAR’ Review: Arnold Schwarzenegger Enters His Dad Jokes Years In His TV Debut at The Playlist.

A question comes up part of the way through Ric Roman Waugh’s “Kandahar” that the film can’t find an answer for: Is this a Sad Dad Gerard Butler action picture or a Gritty Dad Gerard Butler action picture? Either way, he’s a dad, but in Sad Dad Butler films, that’s a feature; in Gritty Dad Butler films, it’s window dressing. “Kandahar” isn’t quite one or the other.

Continue reading ‘Kandahar’ Review: Gerard Butler Escapes Afghanistan Without Saying Much at The Playlist.

For wearisome reasons, the World War II cinema canon focuses mostly on the same handful of European nations — Germany, France, Italy, and England — and spares little room for others. This is a mildly annoying habit that the movies will inevitably self-correct; the world happens to be pretty big and the war was fought across all its corners, so we’ll never run out of stories to tell about it. We’ll just have to go out of the way to find them, like, say, to Lapland, the setting of Jalmari Helander’s “Sisu,” a wartime action thriller of bloody excess where location is everything.

Continue reading ‘Sisu’ Review: Jalmari Helander’s WWII Action Film Makes History Fun… And Incredibly Gory at The Playlist.

Every instance of abject grief, embarrassment, disappointment, and failure known only by teenage boys can be sourced to cosmological forces beyond their control or to a bummer ticket in the biological lottery. Imran J. Khan’s first feature, “Mustache,” opts to merge the two under the same awkward umbrella. If a lad can be betrayed by his own body, then certainly it’s within the universe’s power to provoke that betrayal, laying the groundwork for early body image issues dovetailing with hormonal, emotional, and cultural issues simultaneously.

Continue reading ‘Mustache’ Review: Imran J. Khan’s Coming Of Age Comedy Comes Up Short With Its Supporting Cast [SXSW] at The Playlist.

The opening scene of Kenneth Dagatan’s sophomore feature, “In My Mother’s Skin,” promises the audience each of the horror genre’s grisliest thrills: The squelching sounds of oozing blood, the sight of flesh-ripping carnage in progress as well as in past tense, a carnivorous monster with a death rattle that’d make Sadako Yamamura croak with pride and a rangy tongue that’d stir Gene Simmons’ admiration. Dagatan keeps his promises.

Continue reading ‘In My Mother’s Skin’ Review: Kenneth Dagatan’s WWII Fairy Tale Features A Wicked Morality Not For The Faint Of Heart [Sundance] at The Playlist.

Working parents trudging through the muck of their personal lives and neverending responsibilities tend to make the same mistake: They forget about their children. Laura Moss’ debut film, “birth/rebirth,” forgets the child, too, but for her purposes, this is a feature and not a lapse. Around 40 of the movie’s 98 minutes go by with barely a moment’s thought given to the little girl at the center of Moss’ script, co-written with Brendan J.

Continue reading ‘birth/rebirth’ Review: Laura Moss’ “Frankenstein” Riff Is Alive, Thanks To Judy Reyes’ Stunning Performance [Sundance] at The Playlist.

Music! It is the beating soul beneath a film’s imagery, visuals, and performance. And one of the things we love most about writing about the Best Scores & Soundtracks of the year, in this case, 2022, is how it just makes us understand a film all over again on a deeper, more intuitive-level, especially when you’re just listening to a score or soundtrack on its own, without the context of a movie, and it’s just communicating so much to you.

Continue reading The Best Scores & Soundtracks Of 2022 at The Playlist.

We all love actors, directors, music, and all of it, but cinema is obviously a visual medium first and foremost, and boy, do we love a handsome, nice-to-look-at picture. Cinematography usually gets turned into “pretty pictures,” what is the most colorful, the most sun-dappled, etc. And sure, some of that is represented here (“Aftersun”), but what represents “Best Cinematography,” to us, should be as layered, complex, and meaningful as cinema itself.

Continue reading The Best Cinematography Of 2022 at The Playlist.

Episodes 1 and 2 of “Gangs of London’s” second season cut the path for Episode 3, where the story begins in earnest. This is typical of most television shows with scope and pretense: If we make it through the first one or two hours of expository material, we’re rewarded for our patience with the part where things start getting good. What a treat. “Gangs of London” starts out well enough in its return to air, a sharp contrast to so much of what runs on premium cable and streamers, but Corin Hardy, taking over showrunner duties from series creator Gareth Evans for the latest round of frenetic mob mayhem, holds in reserve the season’s “what” until “Episode 2’s” final minutes. 

At best, this is a venial sin, but at worst, the “what” in question hinges on a reveal that viewers who’ve never seen a thriller before will consider a “spoiler.” On the other hand, anyone with even a passing awareness of what comprises “dead” in high-tension tales of backstabbing conspiracy probably suspects that the climactic character death in “Gangs of London’s” first season was a red herring.

Continue reading ‘Gangs of London’ Review: Corin Hardy Takes Over The Hyperviolent Crime Saga For Season 2 & Mostly Delivers The Goods at The Playlist.

Making a new “Hellraiser” film in 2022 is an exercise about “better,” not “good.” Like most staple 1980s horror series, “Hellraiser” goes two entries deep with the original classic and a good-but-not-as-good follow-up, though “Hellbound: Hellraiser 2‘s” status as less than “Hellraiser” depends on who you ask. But step into the 1990s with “Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth,” and the franchise starts walking on air like Wile E.

Continue reading ‘Hellraiser’ Review: Jamie Clayton Shines In A New Adaptation Without Much On Its Mind at The Playlist.

Are you over the COVID pandemic, or are you over COVID pandemic horror films? Probably both. This makes “Sick” a hard sell: A horror movie born in the pandemic era, set in April 2020, when all but a handful of holdout states in the U.S. had issued stay-at-home orders and buying hand sanitizer from distilleries was easier than from the local CVS. This is not a moment anybody wants to revisit in 2022, or possibly ever, but writer Kevin Williamson and director John Hyams ask us to do exactly that in their mean, economically made COVID slasher, two words that read as incongruous side by side but pair far better than viewers weary of contemporary outbreak horror could anticipate.

Continue reading ‘Sick’ Review: Kevin Williamson & John Hyams’ COVID Horror Film Is Worth Catching [Fantastic Fest] at The Playlist.

When journalist and documentarian David Farrier grows restless, he must wish for the cosmos to deliver him a story in his niche: kooky, off-radar, and with a forbidding underbelly. And when David Farrier makes a wish, a monkey paw on the other side of the world twitches. Farrier took a pivot from entertainment reporting in 2016 with his debut film, “Tickled,” falling through the looking glass into a shadowy world of legal threats and defamation.

Continue reading ‘Mister Organ’ Review: David Farrier Bites Off More Than He Can Chew In Excellent New Doc [Fantastic Fest] at The Playlist.

#MeToo has done a lot of good for culture in the five years since the movement’s birth. But there’s bad to take with that good, too, like the endless and awkward sloganeering that commodified the cause as a series of catchphrases: Dismantle the patriarchy; smash the patriarchy; burn down the patriarchy. The last of these, at least, fell out of popular use after Daenerys Targaryen’s blazing heel turn in the “Game of Thrones” finale, because no one wants the necessary work of breaking up macho monopolies over levers of power associated with the indiscriminate incineration of innocent men, women, and children.

Continue reading ‘The Young Arsonists’ Review: Sheila Pye’s Striking Feature Debut Wants To Burn It All Down [TIFF] at The Playlist.

Can you get the same satisfaction from a round of “NBA 2K” as you can from dunking in real life? Is a trip to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park good enough to check off “African safari” on your bucket list? Does pelting your brother-in-law’s best man with paintballs at the bachelor party make you a combat veteran? Look away if you don’t want to spoil the answers, but: No, no, and no, and puttering around a Quonset hut pretending to be an astronaut isn’t the same thing as hitching a rocket to Mars, either.

Continue reading ‘Viking’ Review: Stéphane Lafleur’s Latest Matches Absurdism With Shocking Beauty [TIFF] at The Playlist.

Massachusetts is the best state to live in for reasons its residents have always known: we’re smarter, healthier, happier, and all around better off than everybody else. We have the decency and common sense to shove most of our pro-fascist wingnuts toward the boondocks. We also know what to do in inclement weather: hunker down with our stockpiled milk and bread until the snow stops falling. 

The last is a lesson the characters in Gabe Polsky’s “Butcher’s Crossing” would do well to learn.

Continue reading ‘Butcher’s Crossing’ Review: Nicolas Cage Shows The High Cost Of Frontier Capitalism [TIFF] at The Playlist.

Watching pop culture bicker with itself is a rare hoot. Last Sunday, HBO premiered “House of the Dragon,” the network’s first “Game of Thrones” spin-off; tacitly acknowledging the medieval fantasy misery fest’s brand, the pilot episode builds to a birth scene shot with grisly excess and ending with mother and child wrapped in funeral shrouds. This week, Apple TV+ kicks off the third and final season of its own “Thrones” spin-off, “See,” with a birth scene that cares about such antediluvian details as tension, stakes, and basic empathy.

Continue reading ‘See’: Apple TV+ Follows Jason Momoa’s Post-Apocalyptic Series Through To An Applause-Worthy End at The Playlist.

“Of Medicine and Miracles” could have been a podcast. It could have been a newspaper feature. It could have been a book, even. It didn’t need to be a documentary. Saying so brings me no pleasure; dumping Ross Kauffman’s latest into the same bucket as countless modern docs that don’t justify themselves as cinema feels brutish, given the subject matter. The story of how the immunologist Carl June figured out how to train T cells to fight cancer, and how his research ultimately saved young Emily Whitehead, sentenced with a mortal leukemia diagnosis at six years old, is remarkable and moving, and worth attending even a decade after her miraculous full remission.

Continue reading ‘Of Medicine and Miracles’ Is A Documentary Too Little And Too Late [Tribeca Review] at The Playlist.

“A priest in a pinstripe suit.” That’s how Andrew Kirtzman characterizes Rudy Giuliani early in Jed Rothstein’s “Rudy! A Documusical,” his chronicling of how America’s erstwhile mayor became America’s most embarrassing punchline. Kirtzman, Giuliani’s biographer, makes a reasonable simile. Giuliani did ponder priesthood in his 20s; after all, if you can imagine for a minute that he was ever 20 years old. He looks like Bat Boy’s frazzled mascara-smeared grandpa. Youth, much like scruples, integrity, and the capacity for going 5 minutes without making an ass of himself, passed the man like a ship avoiding an iceberg.

Continue reading ‘Rudy! A Documusical’ Review: Cut The “Musical,” Keep The “Rudy!” [Tribeca Review] at The Playlist.

White people have stolen music from black people for decades and then some. This is a matter of historical record. No surprise, then, that white musicians stole techno, too. Kristian R. Hill’s documentary “God Said Give ‘Em Drum Machines” purportedly runs down techno’s long journey from Detroit to Germany, from the hands of black artists to European ones, from the 1980s to the 2000s and beyond; one of Hill’s main subjects, Juan Atkins, lays the groundwork for making this case very early in the film, citing Pat Boone’s lifting Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” as just one instance among many others of white mediocrity diluting black genius.

Continue reading ‘God Said Give’ Em Drum Machines’ Doesn’t Quite Live Up To Its Historic Premise [Tribeca Review] at The Playlist.

The movies have given us man-children for decades, dating back to Carl Reiner’s “The Jerk,” leading all the way to a bumper crop of “dudes stuck in arrested development” productions through the 2000s and 2010s: “Cyrus,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Adult Beginners,” “The Comedy,” “Step Brothers,” “Jeff Who Lives at Home.” Alex Heller’s feature debut, “The Year Between,” descends from this overdone tradition and leaves a new wrinkle on the formula: Bipolar disorder, a formidable condition characterized by extreme mood swings and thus a clear goldmine for slacker burnout comedy.

Continue reading ‘The Year Between’ Burns Out On Bipolar Humor [Tribeca Review] at The Playlist.

A “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movie made for 2022 is a low-expectation enterprise. Is it set in Texas? Is there a massacre? How about a chainsaw? Check the boxes, and off you go. The “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” series is so disjointed, comprising a delightfully gonzo pair of sequels and a handful of botched reboots, that a straightforward, satisfying slasher is all that a contemporary Leatherface film needs to be. David Blue Garcia, armed with a script by Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, takes the straightforward route.

Continue reading ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ Review: David Blue Garcia Lets Leatherface Rip In Delightfully Gory Sequel at The Playlist.

Woody Allen’s decade-long downward spiral began after making “Midnight in Paris” in 2011 and following it up with a series of movies ranging from bad to worse to worse than that: “Irrational Man,” “Wonder Wheel,” “Cafe Society,” “A Rainy Day in New York.” At least we have the minor gift of “Blue Jasmine,” a comparatively fine movie according to the pathetic standard set by the rest, to counterpoint the nearly annual stream of Allen’s shrugging dross, but the emphasis is on “minor.” What a difference a change in era made for one of American cinema’s most influential directors.

Continue reading ‘Rifkin’s Festival’ Review: Woody Allen’s Latest, Yet Again, Proves His Best Days Are Behind Him at The Playlist.

Every so often, the movies like to argue with themselves by dropping two versions of the same story within spitting distance of one another: “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” “Deep Impact,” and “Armageddon.” The one-two punch of Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket” and Jamie Dack’s “Palm Trees and Power Lines” is, for clarity’s sake, nothing like dueling dumb-dumb disaster spectacles, but to consider Dack’s film without considering Baker’s is both impossible – everyone at Sundance is doing it– and frankly careless (but mostly impossible). 

“Palm Trees and Power Lines,” an adaptation of Dack’s 2018 Cannes short of the same name, stars Lily McInerny as Lea, a detached, bored teenager living in what might be Florida – the state claiming the most palm trees in the country – but which, for Dack’s purposes, may as well be Anywhere, USA.

Continue reading ‘Palm Trees And Power Lines’ Review: The Dynamics Of Sexual Predation Are Played To A Dark, Logical Conclusion [Sundance] at The Playlist.