Thirty-seven years after the horror franchise Phantasm debuted, director Don Coscarelli passes the directorial reins to David Hartman for what is being billed as the final installment in the popular mind-twisting series. Although there isn’t much left here for fans of the original to really cling to, there is a sense of the series getting back to its roots. Actor Reggie Bannister returns as Reggie, and other series regulars A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, and Kathy Lester also return for a tale that brings the story right into the core of the Tall Man’s (Angus Scrimm reprising his role) home world.
How do you make a two-hour movie about a forced water landing in the Hudson River that lasted 208 seconds, where everyone already knows the happy outcome? You don’t. You keep it to a 90-minute running time and make two mini-movies: one about the exceptional skill and decision-making that saved lives in the air and on the ground, and one about bureaucrats second-guessing that decision-making. Weaving the stories together keeps Sully from being overly dull, but a documentary format might have been more interesting.
Rachel (Emily Blunt) is a lost soul who eases the lingering pain of her divorce with ample doses of alcohol, particularly on her daily rail trips to and from Manhattan. Her only diversion is an elaborate fantasy about someone she sees from her moving window, Megan (Haley Bennett), and projecting all of her longing onto this stranger. And then one day Rachel spies Megan doing something she ought not to, threatening the idyllic life the voyeur has imagined for her. She even goes so far as to attempt a confrontation with Megan, but it quickly becomes a boozy blur of violence.
Henry is part of a radical military experiment that merges cybernetic machinery with biological tissue to create the ultimate super soldier. When Henry wakes up in a high-tech laboratory missing two of his limbs, he is unable to speak. He also has no memory of who he was beforehand. A fetching lab technician attaches his new cybernetic limbs, and very shortly thereafter, the door to the lab explodes open and all hell breaks loose… and pretty much stays on the loose for the next 90 minutes.
I was thrilled with Punch-Drunk Love when it came out: such loopy energy, zigzag surprises, so preposterous but insouciantly so oddly appealing—a mess but a dazzling mess, like most of P.T. Anderson’s movies. A decade-and-a-half later, it’s lost a lot of its punch. I don’t know if I’ve changed, if imitations have sucked out its novelty, or what, but its shortcomings now shine too clearly. Adam Sandler plays a plumbing-parts salesman who’s out on the spectrum (a bit of Benjamin Braddock crossed with Rain Man), who’s never traveled or had a girlfriend, who’s always been tormented by seven playful sisters who don’t know the madness they’re inflicting.
Forget all the hyperbole about an all-female cast and man-hating: Is this Ghostbusters reboot any good simply based on merit? Yes and no. The movie retreads familiar ground and tries too hard to emulate its predecessor but has fantastic special effects. Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones are a group of paranormal hunters. McCarthy and Wiig play longtime pals once estranged from each other, reunited when Wiig is fired from her position at Columbia University due to McCarthy’s publishing of a book they wrote years earlier expounding on the existence of ghosts.
This elegant, suspenseful adaptation of John le Carré’s novel, Our Kind of Traitor, makes for a marvelous companion piece to the recent excellent TV miniseries adaptation of the writer’s The Night Manager. Here, a bored and lost university poetry professor whose marriage is in crisis—one of le Carré’s endless supply of honorable and principled innocent civilians who, seeking purpose and redemption, allow themselves to become involved in international intrigue—is seduced into helping Dima, a charismatic money launderer for the Russian mafia desperate to defect to England and save his family.
The Legend of Tarzan nearly functions as a sequel of sorts, picking up where most other Tarzan movies leave off. It’s 1890 and the man formerly known as Tarzan, John Clayton III the Earl of Greystoke, and his beautiful wife Jane are happily married and living as aristocrats in England.
The mind reels at the creativity needed to craft a sequel to Finding Nemo, once the most popular Pixar movie of them all. The results pick up a year after clownfish-dad Marlin went on a quest to locate his missing son, and now traveling companion Dory is the one in need of finding. The lovably forgetful blue tang (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) is on her own mission now, to reconnect with her parents, but soon enough she’s “trapped” at a marine biology theme park, reunited with some chums of her youth and aided by some new aquatic allies.
In old Japan, young Kubo lives in a mountain cave with his mother, whose mental clarity comes and goes. As an infant he lost an eye, and his father is long gone. Every day he goes to the market in a nearby town to entertain the locals with his three-string shamisen and wondrous stories, told with magic origami that fold and unfold into lifelike characters. His stories never have an ending, much to the disappointment of the townsfolk. Nevertheless, they’re ready for more the next day (Kubo apparently invented the miniseries cliff-hanger).
Three years into their five-year mission, the crew of the Enterprise is in dire need of shore leave. Fortunately, they’re in a sector of space with an advanced star base, and they drop in for a visit. Shortly after their arrival, a distress call comes from a remote nebula, and their leave is cut short since the Enterprise is the only ship in the sector that can navigate through it. Once inside, they meet a deadly alien race in search of a rare artifact that just happens to be located on the Federation ship and will kill anything in their path to obtain it—even the Enterprise crew.
Two decades after Independence Day, the bug-like aliens that threatened humanity are back with their queen in Independence Day: Resurgence, bigger and badder than ever. Earth has been preparing for the return of the aliens, and humanity has come together to cooperate in unprecedented fashion, using the aliens’ own technology to build up planetary defenses. No one anticipated the aliens would return more advanced, with a mothership 3,000 miles in diameter with impenetrable force fields and a swarm of hive-like fighter jets. Central command must devise a plan with the help of recovered friendly alien technology to take out the enemy aliens’ queen.
Bigger-than-life John Wayne stars as Sean Thornton, a mild-mannered American returning to his native Ireland, seeking nothing more than a peaceful life in a charming village. But his homecoming is soon complicated by the sight of a tempestuous redhead (Maureen O’Hara) and by the aggressions of a blustery local bully... who just so happens to be her brother. Sean does his best to blend into the colorful community, occasionally led into an inadvertent clash of cultures, and ultimately forced to confront a dark secret from his past, all culminating in one of the most satisfying two-fisted finales in movie history. Much of the story might seem a bit quaint or even politically incorrect to modern audiences, but The Quiet Man endures as a sweetly irresistible bit of entertainment, quite possibly inspiring an urge to visit The Emerald Isle or at least throw back a pint.
The world of the battle-bred Orcs is dying. They must find a new domain to inhabit, which requires brutal conquest. Their chief sorcerer, Gul’dan, has devised a way to open a mystic portal into the human world of Azeroth and… oh, who cares? We’ve seen all this before. Warcraft follows the paint-by-numbers formula for wizards, warriors, and witchcraft, taken from the sacred scrolls of the Dungeons & Dragons playbook; shamelessly lifting countless elements from the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings sagas, and vainly trying to replicate the dramatic scope and gravitas of Game of Thrones. And all while trying to carve its own niche in the genre.
When a child’s father leaves his home in a small village to seek work in the city, his young son, not understanding why his father has left, sets out on a mission to find him.
That’s the plot of Brazilian director Alê Abreu’s dramatically obscure but stunningly animated film. We’re encouraged to experience the world through the boy’s eyes. If his world doesn’t always make sense to us, that may be the point. The world is a jumble
to a young boy, and the result is a brilliant and visually compelling adventure. The film was nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2015 (Inside Out won, however).