Shows You Should Be Watching
Honest reviews. Zero hype.
The middle prequel is where the romance was supposed to make us care about Darth Vader’s fall, and it is the least convincing love story ever staged at this budget. Anakin and Padme wander picnic meadows reciting lines about sand,…
Twenty plus years of waiting for more Star Wars, and this is what arrived: a movie about trade negotiations. The Phantom Menace is not the disaster of its reputation, but it is a crushing disappointment, a film where George Lucas…
Return of the Jedi gets graded on a curve because it follows the two greatest adventure films of its era, and the drop is real but smaller than people remember. The plot resolves everything the trilogy set up: Luke confronts…
The middle chapter of the original trilogy is the one where Star Wars grew up. Irvin Kershner directed, Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett wrote, and together they did something sequels almost never do: they made the heroes lose. The Rebels…
There is a reason every space movie since 1977 has been chasing this one. George Lucas took the serial adventure format nobody took seriously and built a galaxy around it, complete with dirty used futures, a villain in a black…
The first family, finally in the right hands. Marvel’s third attempt at the Fantastic Four plants them in a gorgeous retrofuturist 1960s, a Kennedy era New York with chrome rockets, analog televisions, and a public that treats its heroes like…
The B team movie that outperformed its pedigree. Thunderbolts* gathers the franchise’s leftovers: Florence Pugh’s Yelena, Wyatt Russell’s disgraced U.S. Agent, Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster, Lewis Pullman’s hollow legged Bob, and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky, now a congressman with a stainless steel…
The movie that kept getting taken apart and reassembled in public. Brave New World went through multiple rounds of reshoots and a title change, and the released cut plays like a committee arguing with itself: a political thriller about a…
The rude middle finger the franchise needed after five years of drift. Deadpool & Wolverine pairs Ryan Reynolds’ merc with the mouth with Hugh Jackman’s Logan one more time, and the film’s premise is openly a corporate satire: Wade Wilson…
The shortest Marvel movie ever made, which turns out to be both its identity and its epitaph. The Marvels runs 105 minutes, and it moves like a pilot for a series that was canceled mid production: three heroes, one villain,…