Sisu: Road to Revenge knows exactly what its audience wants, and gives it to them with both the force and subtlety of a runaway ballistic missile to the head. This could be one of the most violent movies I’ve ever seen, though perhaps my memories of the original Sisu grow dim. It spends every one of its 89 minutes of runtime doing nothing more than trying to outdo the previous bombastic setpiece with a new explosive spectacle by shooting, stabbing, crushing, crunching, and va

The most important, impressive thing about The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is that it feels like both a natural evolution of and a challenge to its world and the people who live in it. Where the first movie introduced its universe, this one asks the questions that threaten its foundations. This is a teen movie, yes, and occasionally limited by that, but it’s a very good teen movie that feels denser and more inhabited than before, less like a movie set, more like a real world

The very title of The World's End is one big pun, and not a very good one. To be fair to puns of all shapes and sizes, it's not meant to be, and it won’t surprise you to hear that this movie contains just as many jokes as both Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, the other two films in what has become the most unconventionally structured trilogy I’ve ever seen, if one can even call it that. This is solid work from Edgar Wright, even if you can’t help but get the sense while watchi

The ads for Hot Fuzz hail it as being from the guys who watched every action movie ever made, and having seen the thing more than once, it certainly begins to feel like watching every action movie that’s ever been made, as if I were sitting in a room full of TVs all playing the movies that inspired this one – that’s a good thing. It isn’t just an action movie or a parody: it’s a hybrid. It isn’t just a comedy, either: it’s hysterical. It’s the sum of what so many other action

No matter how tired I grow of Disney's never-ending supply of live-action remakes, a part of me knows that there is a group of people waiting in the wings to give them an irritatingly poor review, no matter how good or bad they actually end up being. I, for one, do not subscribe to the extremes of our culture war, and maybe that's why I'm happy that there are a number of good things to say about the live-action version of Moana, though I can't help but wonder how desperate Di

I’ve heard plenty of spins of the idea that Project Hail Mary is the type of movie Hollywood needs to start making again, and to an extent, I actually agree with the sentiment. No, it’s not as though the last five years haven’t played host to some of the greatest blockbusters I’ve ever seen, but Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s novel adaptation contains something these other movies don’t: childlike wonder. It’s basically Interstellar if it were crossed with a family film, b

Move over and find a new parking spot, Michael Bay. Bumblebee has a vigorously beating heart absent from every live-action Transformers movie before it; in my notes, I described it as Transformers if it were directed by Steven Spielberg. Gone are the randomly placed Victoria’s Secret models and the oceans of computer graphics resembling metal spaghetti, replaced by a muscular arsenal of charming, well-calibrated callbacks to the 1980s and characters whose most interesting ele

The very first thing you’ll see in Transformers: The Last Knight is a war raging in the forests of Medieval England, a war waged by both the Knights of the Round Table and stony, moss-covered Cybertronians that look as though they stepped out of a mysterious British tapestry from when it was still called Britannia. It feels remarkably different from what I was used to for this franchise in a way that suggests that Michael Bay was hoping to tie all of his Transformers movies t

Transformers: Age of Extinction is sometimes too much of a good thing, other times a shocking abundance of a bad one, but it never lacks for ambition. It’s obvious that Michael Bay wanted to try something new with this movie, and while his hallmarks – namely heavy CGI and randomly-placed female clothing models – are still there, they’re different from before, like they’re finally serving their story rather than simply demanding your attention. This is not the best movie ever

Transformers: Dark of the Moon wants to be seen as an evolution of its franchise, but for all of its attempts at surface-level aesthetic changes, it still wants to blow up the same boring buildings, smash together the same action-figure-like robots, and ogle the same beautiful women. It’s another loud, pointless Michael Bay sequel that doesn’t bother to look for a human touch amidst the carnage. It plays with the history of the moon landings in the same way that Revenge of th

At their absolute worst, Michael Bay’s movies feel like an alien trying to copy the theater-going experience. While all of the individual ingredients – the explosions, the otherworldly robots, and the women who have flawless makeup through it all – are there, they never cohere into something legible. Saying that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen lives up to its notoriety would make it sound better than it is. This is an overstuffed, obese sequel that doesn’t care about what

Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie is a loud, overplotted, and overdone reinvention of a classic media franchise that devoutly worships mid-2000s movie-making cliches. To say that much of what it does is the best Bay’s movies ever got is very dim praise indeed, save a bright male lead in the form of Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky. Even Linkin Park’s What I’ve Done, a rock song that became the movie’s de facto anthem, bears little to no relevance to its story, and considering

Top Gun is a golden calf of the no one makes good movies anymore crowd. Even a cursory glance at this notion some calf-worshippers hold so dear will reveal it to be, well, bull, but it’s not hard to see that blockbusters of the 1980s feel different than movies made today. One may wonder what will become of media discourse in forty years when a new generation arises to take the reins of this weird notion. Top Gun is a movie that solidified the stereotype of the 80’s action fli

Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables is a flawed movie that knows exactly what it wants to be. I can still imagine the actors' facial expressions when they were first told they would be singing through the entire script. We’re doing what? Contrary to popular belief and my own recently debunked assumptions, much of this story is not about the French Revolution itself; it focuses instead on the June Rebellion of 1832, a separate uprising in France in which the governing elite tried to i

A nagging thought that bugged me while I was watching Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge is that its title doesn't really do justice to its goals. This is a movie not about the battle fought on Okinawa, but about a man with strong convictions who chose to fight it his own way, and it lays down an unusual framework that rubs against our culture at large in a way that I wasn’t used to. I’ve been a Christian my whole life, and one thing I grew up accepting is that Christian movies would

Early in Inception, one character remarks that pain is in the mind. She means it in a literal sense, but her movie ironically seems most interested in probing the emotional wounds we carry around and refuse to tell anyone about. That’s a strange thing to say about a movie in which deep and mind-bending psychological storytelling is so deeply ingrained, but Christopher Nolan uses his spectacle to explore touching and even painful emotional realities, weaponizing endless visual