Godzilla: King of the Monsters Is More of a Pauper Among Modern Monster Movies

The greatest enemy Godzilla can never seem to defeat is not King Ghidorah nor Biollante nor Baragon. No, it's boring human characters, even the rightfully iconic 1954 Godzilla movie that introduced the world to this gigantic lizard couldn't evade the problem of having the majority of its human characters be dull. Why they don't just let Godzilla and the other monsters take the spotlight in these movies, I'll never know, but here we go again with Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which ramps up the amount of monster mayhem compared to Godzilla (2014) but ends up devoting way too much screentime to an overstuffed cast of disposable humans.

Patrick Rarely Rivets But It's Also Rarely Worse Than Harmless. Plus, It's Got a Cute Pug!

I love all dogs in general (I don't know if you've heard, but dogs are good, Brent), but there's no question that pugs are my absolute favorite breed of pooches on the planet. More movies really should take the time to make sure their stories heavily involve this specific breed of doggo, can you imagine how much more tolerable, say, Bohemian Rhapsody would have been if it had given Freddie Mercury an adorable pug sidekick? This means Patrick, a new family movie from director Mandie Fletcher, was starting off on the right foot (paw?) with me by fixating its entire plot on a pug by the name of Patrick.

In Laman's Terms: What Exactly Had Led To The Modern Monster (Movie) Mash?

One perfect shot from 2018's monster movie hit Rampage

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

The last decade has seen a major resurgence in the presence of high-budget monster movies at the domestic box office. Previously the terrain of foreign cinema and B-movie drive-in's, today, the monster movie is a go-to source to deliver spectacle for audiences and drum up plenty of money for studio executives. In the last eleven years or so, everything ranging from Pacific Rim to The Meg to Rampage have managed to crack $400 million worldwide while Legendary Pictures has created one of the few non-Marvel cinematic universes that's actually taken off with the MonsterVerse, a franchise that currently consists of Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island and this Friday's Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Bram Stoker's Dracula Is A Sexually Charged Piece of Cinema That Makes For A Delightful Watch

Bram Stoker's Dracula is one horny movie. It's so horny you might as well call it a crash of rhinos. It's so fixated on getting it on that one is surprised some James Brown tunes don't pepper the soundtrack. Director Francis Ford Coppola has assembled an A-list cast and some extraordinary production design, not to mention Bram Stoker's iconic source material, to create a vivid erotic fever dream about the one, the only, the vampire called Dracula. That description is meant to be a compliment, Bram Stoker's Dracula has refreshingly no inhibitions about what it wants to be is and fully embraces any opportunity to revel in both sex and hamminess, frequently at the same time.

A Private War Is the Best Kind of Biopic Drama In How Well It Explores the Humanity of a Historical Figure

It feels like the grim tone of A Private War was always gonna be a barrier to it becoming a widely-seen domestic box office hit but it's still a pity this feature came and went in such a quick fashion back in November 2018. Topping out at only $1.6 million, A Private War was one of the worst-performing wide releases of 2018 and one of a number of recent releases from Aviron Pictures (alongside Serenity and After) to go belly-up at the box office. As everybody knows, though, box office grosses are not an exact barometer for quality and A Private War is actually a well-made war drama that deserved far more attention than it got.

Bodacious Booksmart Brings Bevy of Brilliant Belly-Laughs

MILD SPOILER ALERT

It's the last day of High School for Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), long-time best buddies who have put their noses to the grindstone and spent all their time in High School studying in the hopes of getting into the best possible colleges. But on this day before graduation, Molly realizes that all the other kids in their school who spent so much time partying also managed to get into good colleges. There isn't much time left for them as high schoolers, so Molly and Amy decide to step outside of their respective comfort zones and go to a party for the first time. Sounds like a simple plan, but getting to that party is going to be far more of a trek than they could have ever imagined.

Disney's Never Had A 2010s Memorial Day Box Office Hit Like Aladdin While Fellow Newcomers BrightBurn And Booksmart Underperform

Note: all figures discussed in this article are three-day weekend estimates. Four-day Memorial Day weekend box office grosses are not discussed here.

The past few months, I’ve been convinced that Aladdin would end up being Disney’s big summertime box office misfire, which just goes to show you that there is one universal truth in this world: I know nothing. Aladdin ended up surpassing all expectations with a whopping $86.1 million bow, the sixth biggest three-day bow for a Memorial Day new release ever. It’s also the fourth-biggest opening weekend for a live-action Disney remake, only The Jungle Book ($102 million), Alice in Wonderland ($116 million) and Beauty and the Beast ($174 million) did better. It’s also the second-biggest opening weekend ever for Will Smith, only Suicide Squad had a bigger bow for the actor. This $86.1 million bow means Aladdin had the biggest opening weekend for a 2019 movie that isn't set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and means that Disney has three biggest opening weekends of 2019.

The Ides of March Is A Shallow Exploration of American Politics That Wastes So Many Talented Actors

MASSIVE SPOILERS WITHIN!!

George Clooney is a great actor. He's usually always a charming presence in whatever he pops up in but he's especially stellar playing more troubled characters that serve as a subversion of his movie star persona, like in Up in the Air or in his outstanding voice work in Fantastic Mr. Fox. He also seems like a decent fella in real life and his 2005 directorial effort Good Night and Good Luck was a well-made piece of historical drama cinema. All of that being said, Clooney's attempts to direct and/or star in films that have some kind of sociopolitical message in the 2010s (Suburbicon, Money Monster, even Tomorrowland) have been a big o'l miss, Clooney always ends up being a part of films that have really nothing need to add to the conversation, they just add surface-level observations at best and downright nonsensical takes on real-world problems in the worst instances like Suburbicon.

Aladdin Is No Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland But It Still Falls Short of Being Something Magical

If you've seen Disney's original Aladdin movie, you've basically seen the new live-action Aladdin feature from director Guy Ritchie, albeit with more inspired animation and exciting musical sequences. To be fair to this new Aladdin movie, it is probably one of the least offensive entries in this series of live-action remakes of animated Disney movies as it lacks the distracting editing of Beauty and the Beast or the repugnant visual sensibilities of Alice in Wonderland. It's inoffensive, sporadically entertaining but even entirely disregarding comparisons to the original Disney film, it's still a strangely empty exercise despite being a Disney musical directed by the man who brought the world Snatch.

Train to Busan Is A Poignant Ride You Won't Want To End

Our current golden age of horror movies doesn't just apply to American horror features like Get Out, A Quiet Place or Hereditary, plenty of recent pieces of foreign horror cinema have also contributed to the onslaught of modern-day high-quality horror fare. Among the very best of those horror films, foreign or otherwise, is Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan, a 2016 zombie tale that I finally got around to watching for the first time last week. I'll be forever kicking myself for not discovering this title far sooner. It's been so long since a movie left me so constantly holding my breath in sheer dread and terror. Why did I waste time watching CHiPS when I could have been experiencing Train to Busan??

The Hole In The Ground Stars Out With Promise Before Fizzling Out In A Ho-Hum Finale

SPOILERS WITHIN 

Sarah (Seana Kerslake) and her young son Chris (James Quinn Markey), like so many horror movie protagonists before them, have decided they need a break from city life and move out into the countryside. Some more down-home living will do them both good Sarah figures. They've barely unpacked their bags before some strange events begin to occur in their new home. First, while looking for her son in the nearby woods, Sarah stumbles onto a gigantic hole in the ground. Then, after she finds Chris near that aforementioned hole in the ground, her son begins to exhibit strange pieces of behavior that are the total opposite of his normal personality. An old woman in her neighborhood once claimed that her son was replaced with an evil doppelganger and was dismissed as a loon. Could she have been onto something? Could that same scenario have befallen Sarah and Chris?

In Laman's Terms: Six Animated Disney Movies That (Probably) Won't Be Getting Live-Action Remakes

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

Come this Friday, the newest in an onslaught of live-action remakes of classic animated Disney movies arrives in the form of Aladdin. It's not the last one of its kind we'll see in 2019 either, with The Lion King, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Lady and the Tramp all on the way in next six months while 2020 will deliver Mulan and Cruella. There's no end in sight for Disney's new excuse to print money (so long as it doesn't star Dumbo, at least) but even Disney is bound to have limits in terms of just how much of its library of animated classics it'll turn into modern-day live-action blockbusters. Below, I've compiled six animated Disney films the studio probably won't be turning into live-action movies anytime soon, the first of which is...

Wine Country Delivers A Vacation That's At Its Best When It Comes To Easygoing Comedy

Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Paula Pell, Emily Spivey, Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer are the six leading performers of Wine Country. That's quite the roster of talented folks to headline a movie and Wine Country finds plenty of amusing comedy out of just the camaraderie of this troop of actors interacting with one another over a single weekend. Interestingly, though, the biggest problem with Wine Country is how it doesn't lean on such simple comedic pleasures enough. Instead, its story ends up leaning too hard on predictable conflict-laden storylines between the individual six leading characters that make one yearn for more grounded sequences of just these six performers trading witty dialogue back-and-forth. 

Knock Down the House Is An Inspirational And Humanizing Exploration of American Politics

Let's not sugar-coat it, the last week of American politics has been a particularly vicious form of disheartening, which is saying something given how the last two-and-a-half years have been the physical manifestation of a nightmare. We need an ounce of hope wherever we can get it and goodness knows movies have always functioned as a go-to format for providing stories that offer up some hope to the world in times of crisis. For the Rachel Lears feature film Knock Down the House (which is now streaming on Netflix), hope is offered through a documentary that follows a quarter of female politicians looking to shake the status quo in American politics.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Cuts To The Emotional Bone With Its Harrowing Performances And Camerawork

When the Hayes Code, a set of restrictions placed on what could or couldn't be depicted in American cinema in order to "protect the sanctity of the family", fell in 1964, American cinema suddenly had a golden opportunity on its hand to explore darker and more adult-oriented storytelling that had been off-limits for decades now. Studios didn't rush to make the filthiest movies they could imagine, but they did start to test the waters with what exactly they could do under the heavily reduced amount of restrictions placed on their art form. Come 1966, the Mike Nichols directorial effort Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would help push those boundaries with a movie that wasn't afraid to talk about grim matters that would have been unspeakable had it been made in the Hayes Code era.

Lynne Ramsay And Samantha Morton Deliver A Mesmerizing Portrait of Coping With Grief In The Excellent Morvern Callar

And so, having now finally watched Morvern Callar, I've seen all four of Lynne Ramsay's feature-film directorial effort. Though Morvern Callar might be the weakest of Ramsay's movies, that's a lot like saying that a specific Carly Rae Jepsen song is her weakest. Jepsen's songs, like Ramsay's directorial efforts, are just varying degrees of exceptional, there really isn't a dud in the bunch. This Morvern Callar is yet another impressive and harrowing piece of filmmaking from one of the best directors working today, one that sees Ramsay turning her artistic focus on people's mental-based struggles in the wake of tragedy onto the story of a woman grappling with her boyfriend's suicide.

Like Many of the Best Time Travel Tales, See You Yesterday Merges Sci-Fi With Intimate Human Experiences

There are plenty of drawbacks to Netflix's method of releasing its movies with little in the way of prominent promotion but it also has its benefits, most notably in how it can lead to the fun experience of a whole bunch of people across the world discovering and enjoying a new Netflix original movie and watching them spread the word about it across social media. Watching that word-of-mouth work to turn a previously unknown film into something everybody's talking is utterly fascinating to watch. If there's any justice in the world, the cleverly concocted time travel tale See You Yesterday will be the next Netflix film to receive that kind of treatment from audiences.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum Has "Excellent!" Opening Weekend As A Dog's Journey Goes Nowhere And Sun Is Also A Star Burns Out

In just one weekend, John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum has exceeded the entire $43 million lifetime gross of the original John Wick movie. This guy really is worthy of his legendary reputation. Grossing $57 million this frame, John Wick: Chapter 3 nearly doubled the opening weekend of the second John Wick movie and scored the biggest opening weekend ever for a Lionsgate movie that doesn't belong to either the Hunger Games or Twilight franchises. It's been fascinating to see the John Wick movies grow from being a sleeper hit to being a ubiquitous element of pop culture capable of opening to such hefty box office figures. Needless to say, these impressive opening weekend figures ensure that we'll be seeing plenty more of Baba Yaga in the future.

The Intruder Is Insultingly Forgettable

MILD SPOILERS FOR THE INTRUDER WITHIN

Scott Howard (Michael Ealy) and Annie Howard (Meagan Good) have decided to step away from city life and buy up a home in the Napa Valley so that they can raise a prospective family in a more serene environment. The humble abode they've purchased previously belonged to Charlie Peck (Dennis Quaid), a widow who has spent decades taking care of this house that now belongs to the Howards...in theory. See, Charlie Peck just won't leave the couple alone. First he shows up to mow the lawn, then he keeps popping up every day to do odd jobs around the house. Annie thinks he's harmless but Scott has a bad feeling about Charlie Peck that turns out to be more accurate than either of them could imagine.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum See's The John Wick Series Continuing To Slay

What a wonderfully out-of-nowhere creation this John Wick series has become.  Not based on any pre-existing source material, the first movie was quietly filmed in 2013 and didn't start its marketing campaign until two months before its October 2014 debut. It was flying so far under the radar yet it ended up becoming a sleeper hit and deservedly so, it was a blast of an action movie that made good use of both Keanu Reeves and well-shot action sequences. Nearly five years later, John Wick has turned into a full-blown saga that continues onward with John Wick: Chapter 3- Parabellum (that title is the worst thing to emerge from this series) and manages to maintain the level of quality that made the first two movies such joys.