Ready Player One movie review: trivial pursuit*
A nightmare of nothingness, of empty, soulless wankery, that serves only to reassure male dorks that their pop-culture obsessions make them special, and will make cute girls like them.
action
Pacific Rim: Uprising movie review: robot smash
Enormously likable characters make this feel like a big friendly rambunctious dog that you can’t help but get a kick out of, but it fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of its predecessor movie.
Tomb Raider movie review: raiders of the old movie
Another videogame adaptation in which empty avatars run around perfunctorily because that’s what the plot requires of them. There’s no humor, no fizz, no movie magic at all.
Gringo movie review: Mexican bland-off
Woefully undeveloped characters, a thin yet convoluted plot, and a lack of humor in the black comedy. This is what it looks like when a hastily scribbled first draft goes straight into production.
Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts 2018 (90th Academy Awards) review
My pick: I suspect that this year’s winner will be “Garden Party,” a spectacular debut from new French animation studio Illogic that I am sure we will be seeing a lot more stunning work from.
Game Night movie review: triumph of the nerds
Absolutely hilarious, full of smart snarksters, comedic suspense, and gleeful smashing of action-movie clichés. Part screwball comedy, part romantic adventure, all pure movie-movie joy.
Black Panther movie review: absolute Marvel
Classic comic-book stuff made fresh by drawing on underexplored mythologies and cultures, yet still deeply resonant and deeply universal. An exhilarating pulp-fiction dream that ups the ante on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The 15:17 to Paris movie review: hell on wheels
Clint Eastwood turns a terrorist attack into a bit of post-hoc reality “entertainment” with the stunt casting of the actual heroes as themselves in a stilted, tone-deaf piece of Christian-American propaganda.
Scorched Earth movie review: there’s still room for feminism at the end of the world
Gina Carano roams a mild yet tedious postapocalyptic wasteland as a bounty hunter, and either you are here for this lady badass of our feminazi dreams, or you are not.
Early Man movie review: primordial goop
A huge disappointment, crude and simple compared to Aardman’s earlier, more sophisticated and multilayered work. No satire or subversion, just a bog-standard triumph-of-the-underdog story.
