Jack Reacher: Never Go Back movie review: don’t go back for the sequel
Jack Reacher is back. And no one seems to know why. Low stakes, a rote plot, and undistinguished action add up to a pointless and unnecessary sequel.
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Inferno movie review: let’s run through the museum!
Completely absurd, ultimately pointless, but also gloriously goofy: a Nancy Drew mystery with Scooby-Doo overtones and a thin veneer of bookishness.
Blood Father movie review: a take-your-daughter-to-work adventure
Sly observations on American hypocrisy, a fresh father-daughter dynamic, and terrific performances elevate this a cut above the typical revenge thriller.
Deepwater Horizon movie review: blood for oil
Immensely intense and suspenseful. Disaster filmmaking at its most gripping, yet there is nothing in the least bit exploitive or sensationalized about it.
The Magnificent Seven movie review: a dusty, dry husk of a movie
Humorless, rote, clichéd, and entirely unsurprising. Antoine Fuqua attempts to recapture old Hollywood magic — and fails — rather than create his own.
The Girl with All the Gifts movie review: I believe the children are our future…
Stakes out its own fresh place in an SF subgenre that is well played out, and rehumanizes it ways that are both extraordinarily moving and deeply unnerving.
Hell or High Water movie review: there will be blood
Alongside plenty of heist-movie humor and suspense is a bleak fatalism grounded in depressing reality and resignation to the miserable necessity it demands.
Anthropoid movie review: human-shaped but lacking in human substance
Familiar-feeling tale of a real-life plot to kill a high-ranking Nazi in 1942 Prague manages some suspense thrills but mostly misses the emotional ones.
Kubo and the Two Strings movie review: quest for family
Magic, music, and monsters come together to create a marvelous fairy tale that’s scary, sweet, and full of tough emotions that kids’ movies often avoid.
Ben-Hur movie review: it’s fine, everything is fine
It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It is bland manufactured entertainment product. It’s fine. Hollywood is not creatively bankrupt. Everything is fine.
