What hinders Nia DaCosta’s “The Marvels” is that it literally is all over the place. This feels like Marvel is trying to squeeze in so much in ninety minutes, and while often it succeeds in getting the idea across, it can also stumble here and there. Nonetheless, “The Marvels” still winds up being a bang up Marvel entry, one that’s packed with some excellent fight sequences, wonderful conflict, and a great trio of characters, all of whom present a common goal in spite of how they operate as superheroes. Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeua and Kamala Khan are all heroes in their own right approaching the ideas of the superhero in their own mind set.
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
Meg 2: The Trench (2023) [Blu-Ray/Digital]
I liked “The Meg” enough to consider it a fun bit of James Cameron-lite entertainment, but I wasn’t exactly clamoring for a sequel. With “The Meg 2,” director Ben Wheatley leans heavily in to more unique elements allowing Jason Statham to be more physically active this time around, while also embracing the Asian influence. You just know Statham requested at least one action sequence of him fighting bad guys, hence the re-introduction of Jonas Taylor. Taylor is still a brainy scientist, but he’s also an ecological activist who skirts the law by breaking on to ships and stealing information from criminals. While “The Meg” was basically “The Abyss” meets “Deep Blue Sea,” this time around director Ben Wheatley opts more for “Jurassic World” meets “The Deep.”
Freddy’s Fridays (2023)
With great success of a blockbuster, there’s always bound to be a mockbuster that comes up from the rear to pull from the momentum. What with the shocking success of “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” we have the UK mockbuster known unsubtly as “Freddy’s Fridays.” From director Ben J. Williams (who gave us “Supernado,” and “Spiders on a Plane”) comes a pretty dull horror movie that is a hefty mixture of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “Hellraiser.” It’s a paper thin premise that probably took a paragraph to expound on on paper, and amounts to a barely eighty minute movie that works hard to stretch the run time with a ton of filler.
It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)
It goes without saying that I like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and I enjoy the whole twist of implanting the formula in to a horror setting. The fact is though that “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is so much more concerned with being a dark bittersweet Christmas fantasy, rather than diving head first in to the horror framework. For a movie that advertises itself as a slasher movie and whodunit, there’s a lot of surprisingly low stakes, and not much suspense at all. The writers frame the movie as a whodunit with the killers’ identities being revealed almost immediately, all the while the slashings all take a back seat for a majority of the movie.
Strays (2023): Unleashed Edition [Blu-Ray/DVD/Digital]
I think what ultimately hinders director Josh Greenbaum’s “Strays” is that it’s nothing that we’ve haven’t already seen before. While there is the more blunt explorations of the dog habits and a lot of gags involving humping on objects, and a ton of coarse language, “Strays” is basically just one of the many, many, many talking dog movies available to audiences. “Strays” is also hindered by the fact that there’s a deep sadness permeating under the surface of its story.
The Dirty South (2023)
When her family’s bar is overdue on payments and at risk of being sold at auction, the owner’s daughter and bartender gets help from an unexpected person and goes to unexpected lengths to keep the bar.
Open (2023)
A couple opens their marriage only to find out that it may not be for them while dealing with an obsessive former teen heartthrob.