Here’s what’s happening in Episode #16 (download .mp3): It’s Cinema Squabble time as the Seattle Movie Critics round table is back discussing a broad cross-section of the past 2 weeks in cinema. Reviews of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation / Vacation / Shaun the Sheep Movie / The Gift / Ricki and the Flash / Fantastic Four Discussion on the Great Comedic Actors […]

Shaun the Sheep Movie is a delightful, family-friendly, stop-motion sensation that gets better and better as it goes along. A priceless gem about friendship, family and sacrifice, it’s a consistently witty marvel filled to the brim with ingenious sight gags, endearingly original comedy and sublime characterizations – all of which are accomplished without any dialogue whatsoever – I absolutely adored. In short, it’s sheer perfection, and I’m not at all sheepish trotting out such an obvious pun as that in order to say so.

But, in the end, it’s the way Dante keeps absolute control of all that’s happening that is most wondrous. So many tangents going at once, so many balls in the air, yet Innerspace rarely falters, never take a misstep, everything building to a rollicking, humorously joyous conclusion that’s as winning now as it ever was way back in 1987.

Showdown in Little Tokyo might not be any good, but that doesn’t make it a disaster, and while I’m still scratching my head wondering why Warner Archive bothered with this one for fans of the stars giving the Blu-ray a look isn’t remotely a bad idea.

Wyrmwood is a hoot. It’s also remarkably easy to re-watch. I had a blast revisiting this one, and I imagine genre fans who lap this sort of stuff up greedily will likely end up feeling much the same. Simply terrific.

I’m not sure I’d tell anyone to pay full price for this Scream! Factory release, the lack of extras are definite downer. But the moment Ghost Town went on sale I’d snatch directors Mac Ahlberg and Richard Governor’s underrated little 1988 gem up as fast as I could, this horror/western hybrid far more entertaining than it arguably has any right to be.

Nope. Still don’t like it. Pegg’s terrific, and Stenders does stage a couple of amusing grotesque sequences of bleak black comedy that did get me to giggle a tiny bit, but overall this film is just too flatly unappealing and boringly obvious in its machinations to be worth much in the way of a viewer’s time.

The fifth entry in the popular spy vs. spy series of action spectaculars, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is a relentless thriller that ends up being marvelously entertaining even if many of its signature moments and beats feel in some way repeats of events from the preceding motion pictures.

“It’s a measure of a pretty good movie, isn’t it? If it’s a movie that you like and you go back and watch it again sometimes you’re a little disappointed because there isn’t much more there than what there was when you saw it the first time. But, sometimes, maybe a lot of times, it surprises you, and you see things in the movie that you didn’t notice the first time, you start seeing things that no one, not even the filmmakers, could have known were going to be a part of the zeitgeist at the time, that those elements would still ring true ten or twenty years later. I’ve been lucky enough to make a lot of those pictures.”