The Lead Character of Alita: Battle Angel Packs A Wallop, The Movie Overall, Less So

After more than two decades of production, Alita: Battle Angel has finally made its way to the big screen. A long-time passion project for James Cameron, the filmmaker behind Avatar has turned over the directorial reins of Alita: Battle Angel to Robert Rodriguez, though a number of fixtures of Cameron's 21st-century artistic passions can still be found in the film (after all, Cameron still wrote the script), primarily the use of a protagonist brought to life through motion-capture animation. Fusing together the sensibilities of the director of Titanic with the director of Machete turns out to result in a movie that's agreeable but not quite outstanding.

Green Book Is Occasionally Agreeable And Occasionally Cringe-Inducing

It's very strange to finally enter the critical discourse on Green Book, which has been in full swing ever since the movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival nearly three months ago, solely because the most I have to offer up on the movie is that it's usually passable but not much more than that. Green Book is very much a traditional crowdpleaser movie, the kind of upbeat easygoing fare that usually wins a lot of Oscars and that general moviegoers go ga-ga for, it's the kind of paint-by-numbers production that doesn't offer up one the chance to say much beyond "Well, maybe your parents will like it?  Especially if they loved The Blind Side and Million Dollar Arm?"

Predators Has Creativity To Spare But Struggles To Use Said Creativity Properly

Nearly twenty years after Predator 2, the Predator franchise came back to life (though these aliens had appeared in the two Alien vs. Predator movies) in 2010 under the eye of producer Robert Rodriguez for a movie whose tone couldn't have been farther away from the cornball nature of Predator 2 unless it had maybe been Cabaret But With Predators. Predators was intended to be a grim n' gritty tale that took the Predator series into outer space and followed a wholly new cast (though, like Predator 2, there's a brief verbal reference to the events of the very first Predator movie) of characters trying to survive being hunted by these extra-terrestrial creatures.

Hidden Figures Is A Total Charmer Of A Movie With A Strong Cast

When ya think about it for even a microsecond, the achievements in space exploration done by NASA truly are incredible, some of the best accomplishments done by our species in the 21st century. We've been probing heretofore unknown territories, truly going, to quote Star Trek, "where no man has gone before". Tragically, NASA has seen massive budget cuts and what not in the decades past but Hidden Figures takes place in an era where we were all invested in NASA on a patriotic level, where it's accomplishments were simultaneously demonstrations of what kind of glorious achievements our country could grasp.

Free State Of Jones Is As Tedious As It Is Sprawling

All good things must come to an end and that includes Matthew McConaughey's recent resurgence as a leading man. Starting with The Lincoln Lawyer in March 2011, McConaughey has had a streak of unique and high quality films like Mud and Magic Mike to appear in that showed new facets of what he could bring to the table as an actor. This past June brought out his newest starring vehicle, Free State Of Jones, which landed with a thud and quickly vanished without a trace from movie theaters across the globe. Having finally caught up with it, it's not exactly a shocker it had such a short theatrical life.