A movie featuring Godzilla and King Kong together on screen should not be boring, and yet, watching Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the latest entry in the Monsterverse cinematic universe, I was consistently bored and underwhelmed. It is a movie that not only barely features Godzilla and King Kong fighting together, but barely features them on screen together, despite them being the titular duo. Instead, we get a movie that features the same…

  In 2019, Joel and Ethan Coen, the award-winning filmmaking brothers behind such films as Raising Arizona, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski, announced that they were splitting up because Ethan Coen was “giving movies a rest” and wanted to focus on stage plays and did not want to work on Joel’s next project, The Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan has now returned to the directors’ chair with Drive-Away Dolls, a zany lesbian road-trip movie that felt…

  I normally don’t pay attention to the press tours of movies, where the filmmakers and the actors are interviewed by dozens upon dozens of media and press outlets to promote their latest movie, but it was impossible to escape the press tour for Madame Web, particularly the clips involving the film’s star Dakota Johnson. Johnson’s dry, off-beat brand of humor was in full force in these interviews, as she talked about how “chaotic” shooting…

  Movies don’t get much bigger than Denis Villenuve’s Dune: Part Two, the action-packed and surprisingly emotional continuation of 2021’s Dune: Part One. Dune: Part Two continues the story of Paul Atreidis (Timothée Chalamet) and his journey to get revenge on House Harkonnen for killing his father and overtaking House Atreidis on the planet of Arrakis. Part Two picks up right where Part One ended with Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) having joined…

  In my review last year of Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla, I wrote briefly about movies with similar subjects coming out within a year of each other, like Armageddon and Deep Impact, Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, Elvis and Priscilla, and the list goes on. We’ve just done that again in the forms of Reality and Winner, two films that look at NSA whistleblower Reality Winner (her actual name) who leaked government documents in 2017 showing Russia’s…

  Watching Argylle, the latest action film from director Matthew Vaugh, was an astounding experience because I can’t think of a movie where I could feel and see it getting worse with every passing minute. What starts off as a fun spy romance soon balloons into a film that is so focused on attempting to trick the audience and amaze us with action sequences (it fails on both counts) that it loses everything good about…