The Goods: Film Reviews
There’s definitely some diminishing returns on the Back to the Future saga, but it stays fresh and fun enough, and feels slightly more coherent as a standalone story than Part 2. It’s also a very satisfying closer to a trilogy that has, against all financial incentives, remained a trilogy.
Not a typical first contact movie, and all the better for it. This sci-fi epic deeply probes the relationship between faith and science; for Jodie Foster’s Eleanor, it finds the overlap. It’s thoughtful and heartfelt, and it builds to a terrific ending.
A solid, moody Hitchcock riff (by which I mean it pulls beats from at least 3 Hitchcock films). Pfeiffer is excellent as the heroine. It’s about 20 minutes too long, but the climax is suspenseful enough to make up for it.
It’s tempting to defend this because I admire Zemeckis’s gusto in making blockbusters with a new technology and toolkit, but I just don’t have it in me. It truly looks like a Playstation 2 game, and the macho bluster in the the story is eye-roll-inducing. The uncanny mocap just never works for me.
After a fireworks-filled opening and a middle act that asks tough questions about flawed heroics, the end is a bit of a mess (burn the coda in a fire, please). Compelling work from Denzel and Zemeckis overall.
Guiellermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio does a bunch of little- to medium-sized things wrong, but none of them end up mattering very much because it is such a fundamentally good movie.
A kooky horror screwball that escalates and escalates, featuring some all-timer body mutilation effects. A whole bucket of fun. The plot is shapeless, but that’s fine. The script is really nasty to its women and generous to its men in a cynical sort of way, which is slightly less fine.
To say the 61st feature created by Walt Disney Animation Studios came and went with little fanfare would be the understatement of 2022.
Romancing the Stone’s biggest problem is that its opening is too good.
Another month in the books — and a year, too.