A Quiet Place is close to perfect, this monstrously entertaining chiller a nightmare-inducing smash I’m going to be screaming the praises of for many years to come.
While a step up from Cline’s book, and while Spielberg does make a number of attempts to comment and dissect many of the more noxious elements regarding gender and race that are found inside the story, Ready Player One never seems to be fully able to reconcile any of its major themes in ways that aren’t either condescending or offensive.
The audacity of a Netflix premiere a little over two hours after a Super Bowl trailer presentation aside, there’s precious little about The Cloverfield Paradox that rises to the same heights as the previous two entries in the anthology series soared to, making this one more of a uniquely weird curiosity than it is anything compellingly substantive.
Even if some of the plot points feel a little underdeveloped, and even though a few of the characters never spring to life the same way here as they do in the novel, the director still does Christie proud, his version of Murder on the Orient Express a gorgeously widescreen old school mystery I’d happily watch again right this second.
Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a tone-deaf, oftentimes frustrating, frequently insulting and moderately offensive exercise in gruesome misogynistic excess that’s made almost as if to convince pubescent 13-year-old boys it’s perfectly okay to treat women as ditzy dolls and little else.
Reset works, there’s really nothing else to say, this ticking clock thriller a timely leap into the human abyss that proves once again a parent’s love for their child is as undying as it is also potentially unstoppable.
The Fate of the Furious will appease longtime fans of the series, the sequel just well made enough that the fact this franchise’s tank is starting to get perilously close to empty doesn’t feel as big a problem as it honestly should. Personally, I am getting a little tired of it all, and while I appreciated and thrilled to a number of moments, and while I’d honestly love to see a spin-off adventure featuring Johnson and Statham and no one else, I just as genuinely am not so certain I’m up for two more of these films.
But there are so many boneheaded creative mistakes watching them smack one into the other with such ghastly consistency frankly boggles the mind. Ghost in the Shell is a stupefying failure that’s close to unforgivable, its apparent inability to understand what it gets wrong and why a perplexing mystery even Major herself wouldn’t be able to solve.
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is easily the most entertaining of the sequels, and while not as consistently engaging as Anderson’s first film, still the best video game to film adaptation to ever see the light of day, that doesn’t make the portions here that do work any less fun.