Peter Rabbit The Movie Is Decent, Though The Titular Character Is A More Flawed Creation

The marketing for Will Gluck's live-action/CGI Peter Rabbit movie made the feature it was advertising look like a nightmare. Loads of pop songs, rampant slapstick and Peter Rabbit tossing out lettuce like it was dollar bills at a strip club, this looked like a parody of DreamWorks Animation movies from 2004-2007, not an actual motion picture coming out in 2018. Thankfully, Peter Rabbit is nowhere near as bad as its trailers would suggest, which is a good thing because 90 minutes of just that initial teaser trailer would likely be classified as a form of torture. The actual movie isn't anywhere close to a Paddington level success but it does register as a decent family movie that works way better at comedy than one would expect.

A Futile And Stupid Gesture Is Tragically Messy And Middling

The prospect of David Wain, the man behind Wet Hot American Summer, doing a movie chronicling the rise of National Lampoon and how that impacted one of its creators, Doug Kenney, is one that sounds oh so promising in theory, especially since one would think Wain affinity for stylized humor would mean that it'd be impossible for such a film to feel like a typical Hollywood biopic. Unfortunately, that very same film, entitled A Futile And Stupid Gesture, does indeed end up suffering from feeling too routine, a word one usually doesn't think of when discussing David Wain's work, but here we are.

American Made Has Tom Cruise Doing Strong Work In Committing 1980's Debauchery

My yearning for Tom Cruise to do more non-blockbuster work has been heightened by seeing him in American Made, which has Cruise delivering one of his better performances in a while as Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), an airline pilot who passes time in his mundane life by smuggling certain everyday items across the border for those willing to pay up for such items. He's caught in the act by a CIA agent known as Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) who offers Barry the chance to use both his piloting skills and his yearning for a more exciting life by piloting a plane that can take photos of the bases of operations for Communist insurgents located South of the American border.

Ex Machina Review

My Super Ex-Machina

Robots tend to permeate pop culture for good reason; they're so flexible from a storytelling perspective that they can be used for pretty much any plotline you can imagine. Robots can crack wise about low quality movies, fight Kaiju or ask you to bite their shiny metal ass. Everybody from Philip K. Dick to Tobias Carlson have dealt with the idea of robotics and how they'll affect the human psyche, and now Alex Garland throws his hat into the ring with the film Ex Machina.

Frank Review

Head To Head

A great artist can come from anywhere, as Ratatouille said so eloquently, and it's a statement brimming with truth. Who knows where the next great artist will come from? In the world of music, talent pops up all the time, with some artists being well and truly distinctive. The titular character Frank could give any given artist a run for their money in terms of idiosyncrasy, as you might expect considering he's a man who constantly wears a giant head over his normal head 24/7.