Bonnie And Clyde's Gift For Humanizing Legendary Bank Robbers Still Resonates Strongly Today

Before they were known as being the presenters caught up in the middle of a massive Best Picture Oscar snafu, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway's most notable collaboration in American pop culture was in their portrayal of real-life criminals Bonnie & Clyde in the 1967 motion picture of the same name. Directed by Arthur Penn, the film is not interested in chronicling who Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) were prior to their criminal escapades, the feature begins with the two meeting outside of Bonnie's house with Clyde managing to coerce Bonnie to join him in his assorted robberies while trying to impress here.  Conversely, its story comes to an intentionally sudden halt once the duo meet their grisly end, solidifying this as a movie squarely focused on just the romance that blossomed between these two legendary criminals.

The Exciting Potential In A New Interpretation of Fahrenheit 451 Is Never Fully Realized

Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 has received a pop culture resurgence in recent years thanks to its relevance to modern-day political issue, making it an inevitability that someone would try and take another swing at giving the novel a feature film adaptation (Francois Truffaut was the last person to tackle this material in a 1966 motion picture). Taking on this material now is Ramin Bahrani, director of one of 2015's most underappreciated titles 99 Homes, who writes and directs the film which stars Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon. Now that's a dynamite assemblage of creative artists! What a shame, then, that this new take on Fahrenheit 451 is more middling than captivating.

High School Musical 3 See's This Musical Franchise Jogging In Place, But At Least The Music's Still Aces

And now it is time for the High School Musical saga to reach their own Return of The King, their own Toy Story 3, their own Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, the moment where they close out a trilogy and bid farewell to the world that turned their stories into such massive successes. Granted, like all those three aforementioned franchises, the seemingly dormant High School Musical would eventually return (a 2011 spin-off centered on Sharpay and a forthcoming TV show specifically) but this was the conclusion of the tale of Troy Bolton (Zac Efron), Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens) and their fellow Wildcats as they navigate High School with accompanying musical numbers and elaborately choreographed dancing.

Werner Herzog's 1973 Feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God Is A Masterclass In Cinematic Minimalism

Though I had never watched a Werner Herzog directed movie prior to seeing Aguirre: The Wrath of God, I've been well aware of Herzog's reputation as a filmmaker who takes on harrowing material who speaks in a distinctive German-accented voice and has a devout love for the art of cinema. The high level of acclaim his works have received makes it difficult not to be aware of his impact on the world of movies, though his enjoyable appearances on programs like Rick & Morty and Parks & Recreation also helped ensure he was on my radar and his presence on my mind has only further increased having now seen what an outstanding achievement in filmmaking his third feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God is.

With A Disappointing Memorial Day Box Office Debut, Solo: A Star Wars Story Isn't Feeling Like A Star Whose Shine Can't Be Stopped

Note: All box office figures discussed in this article are three-day weekend figures.

Well, pull up a chair folks, because we've got a box office debacle to dissect. And not just any box office debacle, no, this is the kind of surprise box office misfire that us box office geeks will be talking about for eons to come. Such a box office performance came in the form of Solo: A Star Wars Story, a feature everyone knew would be the lowest-grossing of the new Star Wars films, but did anyone even imagine it would go this low at the domestic box office? Solo grossed only $83.3 million this past three-day weekend, 46% below the opening weekend of Rogue One and about 62% below the opening weekend of The Last Jedi from just five months ago. It's also only 4% ahead of the opening weekend of Attack of The Clones from 2002 and that's without taking inflation into account. Taking inflation into account, however, Solo is revealed to be the first Star Wars movie since Return of The Jedi in 1983 to sell less than $100 million worth of tickets over its opening weekend. While I'll be refraining from talking about four-day holiday weekend projections in this article, Disney is also saying Solo will barely get over the $100 million mark by Monday with a $101 million four-day haul. And just a few days ago it was thought of as a certainty that this would dethrone Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End's $139.8 million four-day gross for the biggest Memorial Day weekend haul in history.

Kill Bill Slays Thanks To Thoughtfully Realized Characters And Uma Thurman's Formidable Lead Performance

In retrospect, it's nuts that Quentin Tarantino had a whopping six years separating the release of his third film, Jackie Brown, and his fourth film, Kill Bill (which was split into two individual movies upon its initial release). In every part of his career, Tarantino has only taken three or four years maximum in between projects, but then again, he hasn't really done anything as large in scale as the expansive Kill Bill saga in the rest of his filmography, perhaps that extensive break between films was necessary for him to properly prepare for a motion picture of this magnitude. Whether that's true or not, that extensive wait was totally worth it as Kill Bill is a terrific feature that gathers up depth as it goes along like a snowball picking up snow as it travels down a snow-covered mountainside.

Solo: A Star Wars Story Is Better Than You'd Expect A Han Solo Origin Movie To Be But Still Suffers From A Derivative Nature

Ever since Harrison Ford shot his blaster through a mosquito alien in a seedy extra-terrestrial tavern in 1977, people have loved Han Solo. Why wouldn't we? He's got bad boy charm, he's got Harrison Ford's immense charm and he gets to serve as a grounded point-of-view in the original Star Wars as a guy who just doesn't care about all of this alien mumbo-jumbo in this universe. Even as a guy who thinks Han Solo is cooler than a morning on Hoth, do we really need a whole movie detailing the man's background? The fact that he carried an aura of mystery was always a big part of Han Solo's charm after all. Well, Disney marketers, er, master storytellers have seen fit to give us a Han Solo movie in the form of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the second stand-alone Star Wars Story following 2016's Rogue One.

Season Two of A Series of Unfortunate Events Excels In Production Design But Struggles With Tone

Heading into he ten-episode long season two of Series of Unfortunate Events, my big question for this TV show was how they would juggle the programs previously established heavily comedic tone with the darker books they were about to adapt. Just like Harry Potter, those Series of Unfortunate Events books got more complex and bleak as they went on and trying to merge that aesthetic with the joke-heavy Wes Anderson meets Tim Burton style of the show was gonna be a tricky proposition. Interestingly, having now seen the entire second season (which took me nearly two months to complete because I'm the worst binge watcher ever), I'm not sure if they did fully succeed in organically merging the two tones of these individual properties, but they did manage to make an entertaining second season nonetheless.

Blood Simple Is A Sublime Inaugural Directorial Effort For The Coen Brothers

Though Blood Simple may be the very first feature-film directorial effort from The Coen Brothers (like all their earliest works, only Joel Coen is credited due to DGA regulations), this movies does not come off as some sort of watered-down version of the duo's later filmmaking. There's already a noticeably assured hand behind the camera that brings to life a Texas-set noir with real flourish. To boot, it's interesting to note how Blood Simple feels like a combination of two of the Coen Brothers best works that would arrive more than two decades after Blood Simple arrived into theaters. Specifically, Blood Simple combines the grim Southern crime aesthetic of No Country For Old Men with the inexperienced criminals getting out of their element aspect of Burn After Reading.

Robert Redford And Dustin Hoffman Take On A Subdued And Compelling Crusade For The Truth In All The President's Men

A recurring sentiment in the middle of the daily deluge of Earth-shattering political news transpiring in the modern era is that all these events are so unbelievable that they'd be thought of as too far-fetched if they were to occur in a piece of fictional media. Alas, reality tends to be stranger than fiction and it isn't just the current political affairs of the United States of America that are prime examples of this trend. There are numerous real-life events from the past to choose from if you want to look at just how outlandish reality can become and, especially the 1972 Watergate scandal and the ensuing conspiracies surrounding this event, conspiracies that were uncovered by studios investigative journalists.

Nicolas Cage, John Travolta And John Woo Come Together To Create Unhinged Action Movie Fun In Face/Off

Water is wet. The sky is blue. Nicolas Cage is a whole heck of a lot of fun when doing go-for-broke performances. These are all universal truths of this world and the fact that Nicolas Cage imbues even his most peculiar performances with full-bodied commitment should be something more people should recognize instead of reducing this wonderful actor down to just a meme. You know who else is no stranger to eccentric performances? John Travolta. I'm nowhere near as convinced that Travolta is something special as an actor as I am about Nicolas Cage, but he's had his share of memorable oddball turns playing various man-animals.

Melissa McCarthy Can Only Do So Much To Improve The Scattershot Comedy of Life of The Party

The good news about Life of The Party is that's it's a drastic improvement in quality from the last two movies Ben Falcone has directed. Between his directorial debuted Tammy and The Boss, Falcone has not had a great (to put it gently) track record as a filmmaker, but he is showing growth as a director from film to film and that's most profoundly felt with Life of The Party. Unfortunately, even at its best, Life of The Party can only rise to the level of serviceable, but at least the clunky dark comedy that was the modus operandi of Falcone's prior two motion pictures has been replaced by frequently agreeable yuks revolving around an overly affectionate mother returning to college.

Deadpool Has Big Number Two At The Domestic Box Office While A New Book Club Is Solidly Attended And Show Dogs Is Put To Sleep

Blockbuster movies that open to massive $100 million+ opening weekends seemingly have it all, but there is one disadvantage to your original movie opening to such high numbers: there's nowhere to but down. Only five movies have managed to open to over $100 million and then have their immediate sequels score bigger opening weekends: Shrek 2, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows- Part One, Iron Man 2, The Hunger Games and The Dark Knight. Otherwise, the default is that a $100+ million bow indicates your next movie will be opening to smaller numbers simply because it's hard to recreate the kind of momentum that got you to that $100+ million bow. It was widely thought that Deadpool 2 could be the sixth movie to buck this trend, but in the end, the Merc With A Mouth will have to "settle" for a $125 million bow.

Once Deadpool 2 Get Rolling, It's A Surprisingly Entertaining Raunchy Comedy

VERY VERY MILD SPOILERS ARE INSIDE THIS REVIEW.

We've been having a pretty good run of comedies in 2018 so far. Not everything has been golden of course (remember Game Over, Man! or Super Troopers 2?) but in just the span of nearly five months, there has been a solid list of well-made comedic films emerging that remind us all of the age-old versatility that this genre has. Comedies can be mystery thrillers (Game Night), heartfelt coming-of-age tales (Blockers), thoughtful family movies (Paddington 2) and thought-provoking political satire (The Death of Stalin), they don't just have to be run-of-the-mill vehicles churned out on the cheap and quick so that David Spade can buy a new condo this coming summer. Surprisingly, Deadpool 2 comes up as the newest 2018 comedy to deliver both further evidence of how expansive the genre of comedies can be and a large supply of laughs.

Back To The Future: Part III Show A Million Ways To Have Fun In The West

Since watching Back To The Future: Part III for the first time and then discussing the film and the larger franchise it belongs to, I've learned something extraordinary: the low esteem I hold Back To The Future: Part II in is considered a "hot take" of sorts. While I love the first Back To The Future to pieces, the second entry in this series just never clicked for me, Marty McFly's journey into the future and various events of the first movie never filled me with all that much excitement. Back To The Future: Part III doesn't get things back to the quality level of the first movie but it does manage to create a movie that's actually fun to watch and fun was certainly something in low supply in the prior Back To The Future outing.

The Richly Written First Season of Barry Is Incredible

SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST SEASON OF BARRY FOLLOW 

Back in 2014, Bill Hader got to prove his dramatic acting chops in the high-quality film The Skeleton Twins. An excellent dramedy also starring Kristen Wiig, Hader delivered a terrific performance that redefined what I thought he was capable of as an actor. Nearly four years later, Hader's got another sublime dramatic performance to reinforce his versatility as a performer, and even better, it's a completely different character than the one he portrayed in The Skeleton Twins. The character is Barry, the star of the HBO comedy Barry. Who is Barry? Well, he's a hitman, a former Marine and...that's about it. Barry doesn't have anything to his life beyond just being a guy who kills people, his Uncle Fuches (Stephen Root) makes sure of that.

I Feel Pretty Has A Thoughtful Moral And An Abundance of Lackluster Comedy To Impart

I Feel Pretty is your basic middle-of-the-road comedy, but I do want to give it props for conveying an important message that more films need to carry. The idea of making a whole film dedicated to the idea of reminding women that who they are should define what they think is "pretty" instead of narrowly defined conventions of American society is way a more admirable thesis to pivot your movie around than what you would find in your typical disposable Adam Sandler or Kevin James comedy. Good on I Feel Pretty for having such a considerate theme fueling its whole story, though that story itself, and especially how it's executed, is woefully paint-by-numbers in too many respects.

There's Just Enough Gusto Goofiness In Mom And Dad To Make It Reasonably Diverting

Mom And Dad is kind of like an episode of The Twilight Zone. A really demented disgusting episode of The Twilight Zone, but an episode of The Twilight Zone nonetheless. One can practically hear Rod Sterling provide the introduction to said episode as he lays out how something has gone awry in the world and is leading parents to kill their own children ("They say it takes a village to raise a child, but today, these parents will learn it takes only one person to end a child."). Of course such an unhinged vision would emerge from writer/director Brian Taylor, the man who helped bring to life the two well-liked Crank movies and who also helped bring to life the widely-despised Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

The Last Picture Show Fully Commits To A Melancholy Tone, Resulting In A Haunting Movie

Teenagers finally got to be widely recognized as a source of both revenue and storytelling in American pop culture in the 1950's which meant, because nostalgia is such a cornerstone of our pop culture. it was only a matter of time before art depicting teenagers inhabiting that specific pivotal era were created. The 1970's were bursting with pop culture that depicted teenager characters getting into adventures from Grease to Happy Days (American Graffiti was another 1970's pop culture entity that exploited nostalgia for teenage years, though that one was set in the 1960's). Most of these films were upbeat happy-go-lucky fare that looked back on 1950's teenagers with rose-colored glasses.

John Mulaney Is In Rare Inventive Form In His Hilarious New Comedy Special John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous At Radio Hall

For his fourth stand-up comedy special, John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous At Radio Hall, comedian/tall child John Mulaney decides to take the old adage "If it ain't broke it., don't fix it" to heart for various aspects of the show. His cadence, which is best described as the voice of a crisp radio announcer from the 1920's, that was abundant in past specials is very much kept intact, which is a delight to listen to simply because of how well Mulaney uses that natural voice of his to his advantage to help punctuate numerous jokes. His observational style of humor from prior stand-up specials is similarly prominent here as is his tendency to delve into extensive and hilarious stories about his childhood experiences.