Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola spent forty years trying to get Megalopolis, his sprawling, sci-fi epic fable about the Roman and American empires, made. Now 85, it might turn out to be the director’s last film. He waited about a decade too long for his examination of how and why empires crumble to be relevant. Maybe if he had made and released Megalopolis before Donald Trump’s infamous ride down that golden escalator, I would have praised his maximalist primal scream about our current cultural and political moment as visionary and prescient. Instead, what Megalopolis has on offer feels like a thin imitation of our nightmarish reality.
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Alien: Romulus is a nepo movie. Like nepo baby – the original term I’m borrowing and adapting for this new cinematic designation – I’m using nepo movie to describe offspring that coasts into success (of the kind which those without the famous pedigree could only dream) on the sterling reputation of famous progenitors. We’ve had movies like this before, as we had children of the rich and famous using their connections to jump start a career before the invention of the term nepo baby.
What made this oh-so-clever turn of phrase spring into my mind was Romulus mimicking the best, most memorable elements from both mom and dad in its pursuit to build its own legacy. Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez wrote the screenplay for this seventh installment in the iconic sci-fi/horror franchise with his longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues. His movie plays like a best-hits mashup of both Ridley Scott’s genre defining Alien and James Cameron’s sci-fi/horror-by-way-of-war-movie follow up Aliens, with a splash of Prometheus added in for good measure.
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Dead fish are the most potent symbols within Godzilla Minus One to signify director Takashi Yamazaki’s successful attempt to reestablish the nuclear anxieties central to the original film in the franchise. Each time the colossal monster surfaces from the deep in Yamazaki’s movie, Godzilla is preceded by a collection of floating dead fish killed by his own poisonous radiation. In the wake of Oppenheimer – Christopher Nolan’s epic examination of humanity unlocking the horrific destructive power of the atom – and the recent threats of Russian madman Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in his deranged pursuit of empire, a return to the original preoccupation of the 70-year-old kaiju franchise is sadly apropos.
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Based on a 1992 novel by surrealist Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, Lanthimos infuses his wacked-out aesthetic into this modern, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by way of Hal Ashby’s Being There. Sitting through Poor Things is an incendiary, hypnotic experience. The film’s subject matter is about nothing less than the human compulsion for self-improvement.
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Like Star Wars before it, the Indiana Jones franchise has escaped the hands of its original creators. What makes this fact notable is how aggressively this first – and perhaps last? – installment in the Indy saga without Steven Spielberg and George Lucas at the helm looks back to the franchise’s past. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny walks a fine line between honoring what’s come before it while forging a path ahead.
For the most part, it works.
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While The Way of Water is slightly less obnoxious than 2009’s Avatar, numerous Indigenous peoples tribes have blasted the appropriation of their cultures for entertainment, fun, and profit by a white filmmaker. As they did for the first film, these groups called for audiences to boycott the new installment. As you might have guessed, this call for a boycott from some of the most marginalized members of our society did not hinder the movie from making 2+ billion dollars (and counting) at the box office.
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Return of the Jedi, the final chapter in the trilogy that transformed sci-fi movies forever, is itself a rehash of the plot of A New Hope. That, as well as a few other less-than-inspired elements of the picture, make Jedi the weakest of the first triptych of films.
Released in May of 1983, Jedi was the culmination of the previous six years of Star Wars fever. I was about to turn three years old, so, again, I had no cultural awareness at the time outside of the contents of my own diaper. I would like to pretend, however, that I took my brother – who was about to turn 18 months – to the movie while explaining everything he missed in the first two episodes.
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In 1980, I would make my own much more low-key première onto the world stage two months and a few days after The Empire Strikes Back reignited Star Wars fever in movie theaters around the globe. I’m tempted to observe that I missed out on the feeling of anticipation that must have been palpable on the eve of the second installment of George Lucas’s blockbuster phenomenon rëentering the cultural zeitgeist. But I think I have a pretty good handle on what it was like. I’ve been through two additional Star Wars trilogy releases, both encompassing multiple years separating each new installment. And, of course, there’s the MCU, whose overlords have calculated with scientific precision the exact number of seconds between installments in order to achieve peak fan excitement.
Still, I feel like a baseball enthusiast who raves to an older fan about the greatness of a current favorite player. The older fan, the one with more historical perspective, only has to mention, in hushed tones, “That’s great, kid, but you never saw Mantle or DiMaggio swing a bat at the top of his game.” Part of the magic of the original trilogy lies in the fact that nothing like it had ever been done before in film history.
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Star Wars is three years older than I am. The film, now known by the canonical title, Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, was released in 1977, and is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. As part of that celebration, The Texas Theatre is screening all three original trilogy entries over two weekends. During an introductory speech before New Hope began, the presenter mentioned that, while they couldn’t say with absolute certainty, the current caretakers of the Texas believe that this is the first time the original trilogy has ever been screened at the venue.
I mention the relative age of myself and the most influential, culture-shaping sci-fi franchise in the history of cinema as a way to highlight that, like so many millions of other film fans, I do not remember a time when Star Wars did not exist. It has been a constant in my life, albeit to varying degrees of importance, for (gulp) nearly a half-century now. So, there is basically no way I can skip seeing it on the big screen when the opportunity presents itself.
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Director Jordan Peele’s much anticipated third outing of big-budget, spectacle horror filmmaking, Nope, has a lot of big ideas swirling around inside it. The comedian-turned-horror-maestro explored the horrors of racism in his debut, Get Out, and the horrors suffered by an American underclass who exist in order to make life easier for everyone above it in Us. With Nope, Peele’s ideas never quite gel into a cohesive whole. The story is ambitious, the storytelling is thrilling, but Nope ultimately feels like a blockbuster-budgeted episode of The Twilight Zone.
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There is a sequence in the first half of Neptune Frost that references the biblical revelations of the prophet Ezekiel. An important character in the three major Abrahamic religions, Ezekiel is given a prophecy from God, who is accompanied in the vision by four cherubim that have “four wheels” that move alongside each creature.
In Neptune Frost, codirectors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman reimagine this holy encounter with a mix of DIY style that manages to add to its ethereal, dream-like quality. The Ezekiel counterpart in the movie has a harness attached to his back with five bicycle wheels that slowly rotate slightly above and behind him as he moves. The addition of blacklight paint to the wheels and the characters in the scene makes the sequence even more mysterious and hypnotic.
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Like the endless possibilities contained within the movie itself, if you asked a dozen people coming out of Everything Everywhere All at Once what their main takeaway was, you’d likely get a dozen different answers. The themes, connections, and wildly inventive filmmaking come spilling out of this movie at warp speed. The second film from the directing team known as Daniels – the duo is made up of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – is even more bonkers than their first, the inexplicably goofy Swiss Army Man. This time they have the outlandish budget to match their outlandish ideas. The result is a joyous, dense take on human existence that celebrates hope and empathy.
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If the original Matrix trilogy is about revelation and discovering your true purpose, The Matrix Resurrections is about the malaise of middle-age, of knowing you still have something to offer the world even though you’ve forgotten what the vitality of youth feels like. It also explores the idea that humanity will only reach its true potential when we build and nurture a pluralistic society. There’s also the idea that our love for one another gives us our true power; it motivates us to be our best selves.
The Matrix Resurrections is all that and much more. It possesses all of the hallmarks I’ve come to expect from any fantastical tale crafted by the Wachowski sisters, although one of the sisters, Lilly, wasn’t involved in this fourth installment of the Matrix franchise. Resurrections is raucously larger-than-life and messy in that uniquely human way that comes when our passions, emotions, and intellect swirl together.
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I’ll start my review of Dune: Part One by using one epic fantasy tale to comment on another. In The Waste Lands, the third book of Stephen King’s sprawling Dark Tower series, Roland, the hero from another world, asks to hear stories from the Wizard of Oz books. His response when asked why is, “The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.” Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s serpentine 1965 novel Dune dreams of a pitiless, insatiable greed for power and riches, colonialist subjugation of marginalized societies, and a savior who promises to right all. Fifty-five years after the publication of the source material, Villeneuve’s stunning translation of Dune for the screen shows that whether it be 2021, 1965, or 1065, humanity’s preoccupations haven’t changed much.
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Released in the late summer of 1984, Buckaroo Banzai was a financial disaster. The movie made only a little over six million dollars against its 17-million-dollar budget. But the wacky sci-fi yarn built a strong cult following on home video. There are now multiple generations of fans lamenting that we’ll most likely never see the sequel that was teased at the end of the movie, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. The title alone makes one’s imagination run wild!
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And so, in Godzilla vs. Kong, we come to a natural culmination of Legendary Entertainment’s stab at a Marvelesque shared cinematic universe. I phrase it that way not because we actually have come to an end to the MonsterVerse, but because a movie centered around the two biggest draws of that universe, squaring off like Ali and Frazier, seems like a logical end point. Fans can take heart. The pocketbooks behind the franchise have assured us that if enough money rolls in, we’ll be getting more stories featuring MUTOs – Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms. A brief bit of research reveals that a Skull Island series is in development over at Netflix, and Guillermo Del Toro has expressed interest in the MonsterVerse crossing over with his Pacific Rim franchise.
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There are two bravura sequences in director Brandon Cronenberg’s waking nightmare of a film, Possessor. Brandon, the son of legendary horror director David Cronenberg, proves with Possessor, his second feature after 2012’s Antiviral, that he’s up to taking on the family business: creating mind-bending cinema centered around queasy body-horror special effects.
Possessor follows Tasya Vos, a contract killer who works for a company with a revolutionary process for carrying out its assignments. Vos is a possessor; using the company’s technology, her consciousness is implanted in a host body to do the killing. After each hit, Vos is pulled out of the host body, leaving that poor soul to deal with the consequences of a murder that he or she had no choice in committing.
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Gather round for the latter-day tales of the Two Great Ones, Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, aka Wyld Stallyns. As we all know, these prophets saved our society from being totally bogus and instead insured our most excellent future.
Ok, we probably don’t all know that.
In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that if you’re under the age of about thirty, you had never heard of these two sweet-natured lunkheads and the perplexing cult status of the late 80s/early 90s movies that featured them: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.
As someone on the margins of Bill and Ted fandom – I watched both the earlier films around the time of their original release (when I was twelve or so) and liked them, but I didn’t think about them much after that – I was more bemused than anything else when I heard about this newest sequel, Bill and Ted Face the Music.
After revisiting the first two entries in preparation for the new Bill and Ted, I found them both as affable and goofy as I had remembered. They’re the movie equivalent of junk food, to be sure, but guileless and silly enough to be harmless – except for those few dated homophobic slurs that are played for laughs.
I can happily report that Bill and Ted Face the Music is in the exact same vein as its predecessors.
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Christopher Nolan has made an absolutely thrilling James Bond-style spy movie filled with breathtaking action set pieces. Too bad it’s in the middle of a mind-bending sci-fi plot that’s ludicrous and nearly incomprehensible. Tenet frustrates the mind as much as it dazzles the eye. It reportedly took Nolan five years to write the screenplay for Tenet, after puzzling over the movie’s main ideas for a decade. I don’t know if he spent too long on the project or not long enough, but either way, Tenet presents audacious ideas with unforgettable imagery, but the nuts-and-bolts of the plot make zero sense after any amount of scrutiny. The antagonist’s motivation is banal; his ultimate plan is laughably grandiose. And of course, as with most Christopher Nolan movies, the sole purpose of the main female character is to give the male characters their motivation.
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“It’s one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard about.”
Yes, I just spoiled the biggest plot surprise of Palm Springs, the new romcom starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti. Luckily – both for me and the film’s marketing push (the trailer also spills the big secret) – this charming and wacky movie has plenty more going for it.
Palm Springs is a delightful reworking of the central conceit of the Bill Murray/Andie MacDowell movie Groundhog Day, in which Murray’s character is doomed to relive the exact same day over and over and over until fate/karma/the universe decides he has grown enough as a human being to be let out of his hellish purgatory. What sets Palm Springs apart is that this time, two characters – really three, but I’ll get there – go through the experience together, and it leans into the raw nihilism with which Groundhog Day only briefly flirted.
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