Kill Bill Slays Thanks To Thoughtfully Realized Characters And Uma Thurman's Formidable Lead Performance

In retrospect, it's nuts that Quentin Tarantino had a whopping six years separating the release of his third film, Jackie Brown, and his fourth film, Kill Bill (which was split into two individual movies upon its initial release). In every part of his career, Tarantino has only taken three or four years maximum in between projects, but then again, he hasn't really done anything as large in scale as the expansive Kill Bill saga in the rest of his filmography, perhaps that extensive break between films was necessary for him to properly prepare for a motion picture of this magnitude. Whether that's true or not, that extensive wait was totally worth it as Kill Bill is a terrific feature that gathers up depth as it goes along like a snowball picking up snow as it travels down a snow-covered mountainside.

The Punisher Is So Lacking In Creativity Even John Travolta Phones It In As A Mob Boss

Over the course of a 19 year period, we got three different Punisher movies, none of them direct continuations of each other. Instead, we got a trio of attempts to launch a series of movies based on this Marvel Comics character, none of which left all that much of an impact, especially compared to how well-received Jon Bernthal's take on the character on the Daredevil TV show was. The second of these three Punisher movies is the 2004 film by Johnathan Hensleigh, simply called The Punisher, which is one of only two movies (along with that 2005 Man-Thing film that ended up becoming a TV movie) to emerge from an extensive deal Marvel made with now-defunct movie studio Artisan Entertainment to turn various Marvel characters into various pop culture properties.

(Mean) Girls Got (Comedic) Rhythym

Isn't it nice when a movie kind of just knocks you off your feet in how much its quality surprises you? It's an unexpected sensation that totally happened with me after I finished watching Mean Girls for the first time yesterday. Now, it's not like I had never heard of this 2004 Mark Waters effort in the past 12 years, far from it. I knew about October 3rd being Mean Girls Day, I'd heard how fetch was "not gonna happen", the various jokes that had cemented themselves in pop culture in a way very few 21st-century comedies have. Basically, I was familiar with Mean Girls in that I'd absorbed that the film had managed to resonate with people in a certain way....and now I totally understand it.