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Filtering by Category: movies
No sleeves can hold him: Vin Diesel returns as Xander Cage. (Paramount/Revolution Studios)
Just because no one involved with xXx: Return of Xander Cage was ever trying to make a good movie doesn't mean it isn't a bad one. I reviewed it for NPR, for my sins.
It's not as good as Zero Dark Thirty or Captain Phillips. But it's better than you'd think. Reviewed for NPR.
Elle Fanning and Ben Affleck face off. (Claire Folger/Warner Bros.)
My NPR review of Live By Night, writer/producer/director/star Ben Affleck's second adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel, is here. It aspires to be a sweeping period gangster film in the tradition of The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, Miller's Crossing, and so many others, but it tries to bite off too much of Lehane's book to really resonate. It's the weakest of the four films Affleck has directed. Too bad.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers, a miscast and misbegotten fairy tale in space.
I had hopes for Passengers, from Prometheus writer Jon Spaihts and The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum, because I root for science fiction films in general and because I've just edited a story for Air & Space/Smithsonian about research into human hibernation for long-term spaceflights, which is key to the premise of this movie. But its billion-dollar ideas are undermined by its five-cent guts, as I aver in my NPR review. Bummer.
Felicity Jones and Diego Luna lead a small team of rebel guerillas in Rogue One.
My NPR review of what is probably the second-most-review-proof movie of the year after Captain America: Civil War (which I reviewed) is here.
Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as glamorous spies in Allied. (Paramount)
Here's my review of Robert Zemeckis' high-tech-but-old-fashioned WWII espionage thriller Allied. It's meant to evoke a genre that includes great films like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious or Carol Reed's The Third Man. Or lesser Graham Greene works, like this one.
Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams, humans.
I was delighted as always to join my friends Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, Stephen Thompson, and Jessica Reedy for this week's badly-needed Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein no one mentions politics at all because that's not how we do on this show. Here's the episode.
The name the lazy file-clerk in my brain was trying to retrieve while Stephen was talking about how much he loves the Anthrax & Public Enemy version of Public Enemy's jam "Bring the Noise" was Clyde Stubblefield: Clyde is the link between Stephen's picks and mine, because he was James Brown's drummer at Brown's late-60s-to-mid-70s peak. That drums sample you hear at the end of "Bring the Noise" — probably the most-sampled ever — is Stubblefield's, originally recorded for Brown's "Funky Drummer" in 1970.
Here's my NPR review of Bleed for This, writer-director Ben Younger's new biopic about super middleweight champion Vinny Paz's unlikely-but-true comeback from a massive injury. Not essential, but not bad.
