Where'd You Go, Bernadette Is Shockingly Lifeless

After more than a decade doing independently financed arthouse fare, director Richard Linklater, one of the best directors currently working today, uses a film adaptation of the Maria Semple-penned book Where'd You Go, Bernadette as his return to more broadly appealing commercial fare, a domain he hasn't traipsed into since that Bad News Bears remake in 2005 that history has left to be forgotten. Linklater has been on an incredible hot streak in the 2010s with films like Bernie, Before Midnight and Boyhood, which makes it all the more profoundly disappointing how underwhelming his final feature of the decade ends up being. Linklater's well-known for making quiet films but they've never been as lacking in a pulse like Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's Unique Story Deserved A Less Derivative Movie

When a movie makes a whole lot of money, the studio behind said movie (as well as other rival studios) tend to want to replicate that box office success. Normally this is done through sequels, spin-off's, cinematic universes, all that jazz, but back in the day it was a lot more common for studios to just make new movies that were clearly executed in the mold of prior box office successes. For example, two of the biggest movies of the 1990s for Paramount Pictures were its pair of Best Picture winners Forrest Gump and Titanic. Making sequels to such lucrative movies is a problematic idea because, for Forrest Gump, the key creative people behind that movie are just so busy while for the problems with making 2 Tit 2 Anic should be self-evident.

The Bolder Traits of Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle Can't Overcome Its More Tired Tendencies

Andy Serkis may have not planned to fixate his entire career around motion-capture performances but after portraying acclaimed characters like Gollum, Caesar and the 2005 version of King Kong, he's embraced it, to the point that not only has he founded a studio dedicated to this artform but his second directorial effort (following the dreadful biopic drama Breathe) is primarily centered around characters brought to life by the motion-capture process. What project would call for so many characters of this nature? Why, a new big-screen adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book of course, though this time around it's called Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle as an obvious homage to the classic fantasy adventure King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

The Cast Steals The Show And Then Some In The Fun But Visually Derivative Ocean's 8

Director Gary Ross proves to be a far better filmmaker helming Ocean's 8 compared to his last two directorial efforts The Hunger Games and Free State of Jones, both of which, particularly the latter disaster, suffered from amateurish direction that heavily stilted the already struggling stories they were bringing to life. However, Ross as a filmmaker still finds himself struggling with Ocean's 8 as he (along with the cinematography by Eigil Bryld and some of the editing by Juliette Welfling) channels the visual style and rhythm of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven trilogy in a manner that ends up feeling evocative of those three films without ever being fully accurate or satisfying. It's so familiar yet distinctly not the same, it's like, as Jenny Nicholson once put it in describing a Porg toy from Target, "...waking up to everything in your house shifted a few inches to the right."

Thor: Ragnarok Is Here To Have Giddy Cosmic Fun And It's Impossible Not To Join In

For his newest motion picture, Thor has embraced the Skuxx life by taking on New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi to direct Thor: Ragnarok, an exciting directorial pick that pays off in dividends with one a movie that's just true blue fun through and through. Similar to how Waititi was able to wring humor out of merging realism with romantic-comedy tropes in his debut movie Eagle vs. Shark and smashing together the world of vampires with everyday normalcy in his 2015 comedy What We Do In The Shadows, Thor: Ragnarok offers the filmmaker the chance to juxtapose Marvel superheroes with loads of offbeat comedy that proves to be supremely entertaining.

The Next Thor Movie Has Its First Brilliant Trailer

The Thor movies are definitely the sore spot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that isn't Iron Fist or Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. I like the first movie well enough and think the second one has its moments (most of them all coming from Tom Hiddleston) despite some heavily flawed storytelling. But this upcoming third Thor movie, Thor: Ragnarok, has had everyone eagerly anticipating for it one big reason: Taika Waititi. The man behind What We Do In The Shadows and Hunt For The Wilderpeople is taking the director's chair. How can you not get excited for that???

Well, prepare to have your anticipation skyrocket further as the first trailer for Thor: Ragnarok actually just drop, almost out of nowhere. Take a look below!

Carol Review

The new and unexpected tends to always be frightening. Anything that upsets the established conventionality of our lives can be seen as a threat or it can be seen as a chance to grow as a person, to explore new realms of our very lives. Unfortunately, many take the route of looking at the unknown as inherently troublesome, and that certainly applies to members of the LGBTQA community, whose lifestyle is one that many have and continue to fight for. Both in the past and still in our modern society, the idea of two guys or gals living together is treated as an affront to "family values" and "traditionalism", a way to simply upend the standard way society looks at the idea of what constitutes two people in love. Members of the LGBTQA community have had to suffer under the burden of these suffocating customs for decades as they try to make their lives their own.

Fan-Casting The Sinister Six

One aspect of the Spider-Man movies that surprises me is how, even though we've had five films centered around the web-crawler, there's so many parts of the characters mythology we have yet to see in cinematic form. Black Cat, Sinister Six, Kraven The Hunter, Vulture, Mysterio....so many creations from the comics have yet to see the light of a film projector. Part of the blame for these characters staying on the wayside can be attributed  how The Amazing Spider-Man retread an enormous amount of storytelling ground from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, meaning time that could have been spent setting up new characters like The Chameleon and Silver Sable was spent going over the whole Uncle Ben fiasco again.

Cinderella Review

A Cinderella Story

It's interesting to look at how the treatment of fairy tales in pop culture has changed in such a short period of time. At the dawn of the 21st century, Shrek became a phenomenon, and soon, a flood of content was made revolving around lampooning fairy tales. Then, in 2010, Tangled and Alice In Wonderland brought well-known fairy tales to life in a far less cynical manner to huge box office numbers. This had led to such popular entities like Once Upon A Time, Frozen, and the subject of this review, Cinderella, which treat fairy tales with more reverence.

The Trailer For Terrence Malicks New Movie, Knight Of Cups, Has Christian Bale Doing Things

When I saw Tree Of Life in 2011, it was the first Terrance Malick film I'd ever seen. I had no idea what to expect, except for dinosaurs, I knew dinosaurs were in it. Well, I got the dinos, but nothing much else of substance. The film was ambitious, I'll give it that, and the cinematography was beautiful. But it felt like it was trying too hard to be impactful without doing anything actually impactful. It sort of became blur of visuals after a while.

Trailer For Live-Action Cinderella Takes Classic Tale And...Doesn't Update It

Aside from a little teaser trailer that didn't show any footage from this past summer, Kenneth Branagh's take on Cinderella for Disney has been really quiet. That changes now, as a new trailer popped up this morning, just in time to be shown on The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One this weekend. Check out the new trailer below.