Half of Grindhouse Is Utterly Sublime, But The Other Half, Well, Is One-Note Even By B-Movie Homage Standards

Grindhouse is a project only a filmmaker with as much clout as Quentin Tarantino could get off the ground. A 191-minute-long homage to old B-movie double features consisting of two feature-length films, one directed by Robert Rodriguez and the other helmed by Tarantino, it's a project that sounds like a perfect fit for the midnight movie festival circuit but something that would have limited appeal as a conventional wide release project. The Weinstein Company decided to make a big go at bringing Grindhouse to general audiences and pushed it out into 2,629 locations in April 2007 only for it to end up grossing only $26 million domestically, the worst box office performance ever for a movie Tarantino directed outside of his inaugural feature Reservoir Dogs, which never played in more than 61 locations.

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.

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.

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For Review

Superfluous Sin Soaked Cinema 

Visual effects have come so far in the last twenty years, it's one of the more mind-boggling aspects of modern day filmmaking. Ever since Steven Spielberg showed off those CGI dinos wrecking havoc, the possibilities for visual effects seemed endless. Robert Rodriguez has taken advantage of those possibilities several times in his career, namely in the first Sin City (which I have not seen) and it's sequel, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For. That follow-up is the subject of this review and unfortunately, the innovation in its visuals seem like the only thing given any thought in this film.