Film Reviews
Samaritan Proves That Some Superheroes Should Remain Retired: Review
The Pitch: You’ve heard of Superman. You’ve heard of the Punisher. You’ve even heard of Hancock, but you likely have never heard of Samaritan. However, Overlord director Julius Avery wants you to know his name. Adapted from the Mythos Comics series of the same name, this film centers around a young boy named Sam (Javon Walton) with a love for the titular long-thought-dead superhero named Samaritan. Sam has a hunch that the revered hero is still alive, but can’t really prove it as more than a fan theory. The legend goes that Samaritan went to battle with his equally strong yet villainous brother Nemesis over twenty-five years ago, both of them dying in the chaos. Without any real evidence that he’s right about Samaritan still being alive, Sam spends his time doodling, finding scrap metal to...
Spin Me Round Serves Up An Amusing but Messy Slice of Dark Comedy: Review
The Pitch: Amber (Alison Brie) runs the Bakersfield outpost of Tuscany Grove, a popular Olive Garden-adjacent family eatery chain. Great at her job but yearning for something more, Amber gets the opportunity of a lifetime when her boss (Lil Rel Howery) selects her for an all-expenses-paid work retreat to Italy. Amber’s excitement is doubled when her best friend Emily (Ego Nwodim) suggests a tantalizing possibility during her time in Europe: What if she falls in love? On the trip, she meets a group of other lucky Tuscany Grove managers, including the nosy Deb (Molly Shannon), the arrogant Fran (Tim Heidecker), and the friendly Dana (Zach Woods). Most notably, she’s introduced to Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola), the chain’s wealthy, handsome owner. Nick immediately takes a liking to Amber ...
Orphan: First Kill Is the Most Bonkers Horror Prequel In Years: Review
The Pitch: Remember Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), the precocious tot who turned out to be a thirtysomething psychopath from Estonia with hypopituitarism? The one who terrified Vera Farmiga and her well-to-do New England family in 2009’s surprisingly chilling Orphan? In the grand tradition of Annabelle: Creation and Ouija: O-ouija-n of Evil, The Boy director William Brent Bell takes us back to Esther’s beginnings, thirteen years later and with a fraction of the budget. Perhaps “beginnings” is a bit of a stretch, to be fair: a more accurate title would be Orphan: Second (or Maybe Third?) Kill, as we’re introduced to little Leena in 2007 Estonia, two years prior to the first film’s events. She’s not Esther yet, but she has already offed her first host family, the one Ver...
Review: Aubrey Plaza Breaks Bad in the Tense Thriller Emily the Criminal
This review was part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Emily (Aubrey Plaza) just can’t catch a break. She’s a college dropout, reeling from a felony aggravated assault conviction that follows her to every job interview, tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt weighing her down like a ball and chain. It’s calcified her to the world, approaching each new interview just waiting for the next reason she’ll be rejected. All she’s got to her name are her wits and a can of pepper spray. But a rare opportunity appears when a coworker at her degrading catering gig turns her onto a way to make some extra money: show up at a warehouse at the proper hour, perform a small-scale credit card scam with boosted flatscreens, and you earn $200 in an hour. You ...
Day Shift Review: Jamie Foxx’s Vampire Hunter Movie Boasts Great Fight Scenes and Formulaic Comedic Beats
The Pitch: Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx) is a San Fernando Valley pool cleaner, but his mundane job is a cover for other, more exciting work. Casing the house next door while skimming a pool, he puts on a ski mask, loads up on weapons, and storms inside. The resident, a frightened old woman, asks “Who are you? What are you doing in my room?” Without answering, Bud blasts away at her with a shotgun. The woman, revealing herself as a vampire and baring her fangs, stands up with a gaping hole in her torso, and begins fighting back. Day Shift is the directorial debut of J.J. Perry, a veteran stuntman who played Scorpion and other masked fighters in 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and choreographed the intense fight scenes in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. And the scene that opens the vampire hu...
They/Them Review: Kevin Bacon-Starring Slasher Proves Hollow
The Pitch: Conversion therapy is the pseudo-scientific process of trying to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity through manipulation, abuse and torture. Generally operated by religious groups who claim to be doing their victims a favour, this practice is generally carried out in isolated retreats on groups of young people. The new horror film They/Them attempts to frame this specific real-world evil through a likely more familiar horror movie iconography. After all, the idyllic American summer camp has been a home for terror for decades, in the form of brutal murders and/or adolescent awkwardness. A nice trip to the woods offers young people a place of freedom, disconnected from who you’ve been before — while the offer to serial killers is simply a place, disconnected. Most famo...
B.J. Novak Deals Out Some Intriguing But Muddled Vengeance: Review
The Pitch: Ben (B.J. Novak) is a guy who doesn’t necessarily have something to say, but he wants to be the type of guy who says stuff worth hearing. That’s why, despite being a working writer in New York, with publication credits including The New Yorker, what he really wants is to make a podcast. “Not every white guy needs a podcast,” producer Eloise (Issa Rae) tells him when he tries to hard-sell her on his ideas at a party, but things change when a former hookup of Ben’s ends up leading him to podcasting gold. Awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from a stranger, Ben finds out that a girl named Abilene Shaw, who he’d slept with a few times and texted casually, has died, and her family back home in small-town Texas thinks he was the love of Abby’s life. So, after a guilt t...
Jordan Peele’s Nope Is Dazzling, Self-Reflective Horror Blockbuster Spectacle: Review
The Pitch: In the rolling hilly countryside outside Los Angeles city limits, the Haywoods — descended from the first Black horserider/stuntman/movie star to ever be captured in motion — try to make ends meet as Hollywood horse wranglers. But when the family patriarch (Keith David, radiant as always) dies from a freak accident, the task is left to introverted Otis Jr., or OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) to keep the family ranch afloat, with the reluctant help of his fast-talking, hustle-happy sister Emerald (Keke Palmer). At first, they resort to selling off the family horses to nearby Jupiter’s Claim, a hokey Wild West-themed amusement park run by former child star Ricky (Steven Yeun). But fortunes start to change when they realize there’s something above them, in the clouds, scaring the horses and sh...
The Princess Review: The Raid By Way of Tangled, With a Kick-Ass Joey King
The Pitch: What if there was a princess — only she’s not like a regular princess, she’s a cool princess, meaning she can do crazy fight moves, which no one expects because she’s a princess? Girl power! If you’re thinking this sounds a bit like a hacky Matrix-referencing scene from the movie Shrek, you’re right. It does. And Shrek was far from the first or last movie to spoof princess tropes. At this point, Disney has been deconstructing and reclaiming its own fairy-tale princesses for multiple decades, growing from the shallow parody of Enchanted to the multifaceted reimagining of Frozen or Moana. Over this same period, the Disney kingdom has expanded, to the point where it now owns the formerly grown-up movie studio 20th Century Studios (formerly Fox), who have produced their own princess...
Elvis Review: Baz Luhrmann’s First Biopic Is Not As Absurd and Ahistorical As You Might Expect
The Pitch: Baz Luhrmann, the Australian maximalist behind such audaciously stylized films as Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby, has taken on his first biopic, and it’s a monster. Although a few attempts have been made at dramatizing the life story of Elvis Presley, most notably Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s 1979 film also titled Elvis, Luhrmann’s movie is by far the biggest and boldest yet, with an $85 million budget dwarfing every other Presley biopic combined. Austin Butler, a 30-year-old actor who made his name with several teen and tween-friendly TV roles on the Disney Channel and The CW, is the unlikely star of this massive biography of the King of Rock’n’Roll. An Anaheim native whose most prestigious previous project was a small role as a member of the Manson Family in Once Upon ...
Lightyear Review: A Sweet, But Relatively Safe Buzz Lightyear Origin Story
The Pitch: It’s fitting that after four editions of Toy Story over the last 25 years, numerous spin-off shows and games, and a still-undisputed legacy status, Pixar simply wasn’t done telling stories in this universe. But this one is a bit of a curveball: In the year 1995, a young boy named Andy is given an action figure of Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger who served as the protagonist in Andy’s favorite film. Lightyear is that film. Lightyear promises to be the definitive origin story of one of the film’s most iconic characters, complete with a sci-fi backdrop, his signature attitude and catchphrase, and a major appearance from Buzz’s primary antagonist, Zurg. Though they’ve traded Tim Allen for Chris Evans in the recording booth, there’s undoubtedly a classic Pixar feel to Lightyear. The f...
Jurassic World Dominion Has Us Rooting for the Dinosaurs, and That’s Probably a Bad Thing — Review
The Pitch: In a twist no one could have possibly seen coming, it turns out that releasing a wide variety of extinct species into a global ecosystem might have some negative repercussions on said global ecosystem. That’s where Jurassic World Dominion begins, four years following the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which is almost enough time for most of the world to get used to the spread of dinosaurs across the planet. But funnily enough, the most dangerous creatures in this brave new world aren’t dinosaurs — they’re bugs. Specifically, the prehistoric-sized locusts that have begun tearing through the world’s crops, which if left unchecked could have extinction-level repercussions for literally every living creature. Fortunately, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is doing her best t...
