A Great Cast And Confident Directing Make The Brothers Bloom A Delight

The occasionally wacky humor of Star Wars: The Last Jedi was a surprise to many viewers of that space opera, but thinking on it, that sort of humor feels like trademark Rian Johnson, especially in regards to his 2009 feature The Brothers Bloom, which is chock full of stylized gags that feel heavily reminiscent of Monty Python or perhaps Wes Anderson. It takes a little while to get into the heavily ridiculous aesthetic of The Brothers Bloom, but taken as a whole, it's easy to see why Rian Johnson decided to go full-on silly since he's doing an extended homage to the caper subgenre with this project and that's a section of cinema that's well-known for its heightened tendencies.

Don't Expect Salvation For The Terminator Franchise In Terminator: Salvation

On three different occasions in the 21st century, someone has tried to get the Terminator franchise back up and rolling again, despite the entire saga coming to a pretty clear conclusion with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. And on each of these occasions, the resulting films have produced zero sequels and had steadily declining domestic box office results. In the middle of the two most wretched entries in this saga (Rise Of The Machines and Genisys) is Terminator: Salvation, a McG directed effort that brought Christian Bale aboard the franchise as John Connor and surprisingly comes out as the best post-T2 movie in the franchise, though don't take that as a glowing endorsement.

Angels & Demons Is, At Best, Only Passable, But It's Got Way More Life In It Than Its Predeccesor

It's hard to imagine someone walking out of The Da Vinci Code in the summer of 2006 and going "Oh man, I wanna return to that universe!", though it's easy to picture vividly audiences leaving screenings of that 2006 Ron Howard film and muttering under their breaths "What was all the hype about?". And yet, Sony/Columbia was not going to be the studio that ignored the $700 million worldwide box office gross of The Da Vinci Code and respond to it with a sequel, so May 2009 brought the world Angels & Demons, a book actually published prior to The Da Vinci Code but reformatted as a sequel in its cinematic adaptation.