Review: ‘Fast X’ is Quickly Becoming One of the Worst Films in the Series

The Fast and the Furious franchise has had ups and downs from really interesting mediocre movies, to really bad action-packed nothing burgers. These films over the years have become more and more saturated with references to the things it has done before and making cars do crazier things to the point that sometimes they aren’t even cars. Fast X serves as the beginning of the apparent 3-part finale to the series that has spanned over 20 years, 10 films, and a spinoff. A multitude of high-profile names have played both ally and antagonist in a series that has a problem figuring out, even after all this time, what the hell it is trying to do. The series started with a cop breaching into the inner circle of a group of street racers turned hardened criminal group, which later turned into that same group upping their profession into high-risk heists and gang shootouts, eventually ending in the same group repeatedly saving the world? I can’t even begin to explain the absurdities.

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Review: ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ Explodes with Oppositional Cinematic Fanfare

Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Classism, Anti-Patriarchy, Anti-Capitalist. Oppositional Media has been a mainstay in cinema for a long time.  There is a clear history of films being made to fight against the rich and powerful, or the hateful and powerful trying to take advantage of people for their own gain. Now, while a lot of that media involves real footage, and documentary production, there are many times where oppositional cinema is in the form of fiction. These films get us in the mind of a familiar situation to show us how things are. How to Blow Up a Pipeline does this in the most explosive way.

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Review: ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ Powers Up to Mediocrity

Transitioning out of the superhero era of movie blockbusters, we look toward the muddied future of film and television to the next big thing: video game adaptations. Up till now there’s been a history of video game adaptations being less than stellar. Mortal Kombat, Assassin’s Creed, and the dozen or so Resident Evil adaptations have made a mess of the subgenre. Yet recently with things like Detective Pikachu, Sonic, and most impressively The Last of Us, the future for adaptations of this type doesn’t look so awful anymore. With the public realizing that these games aren’t just one note and brain rot, and might actually be filled with genuine characters, heartfelt stories, and room for enrichment in whatever media form they take, there is finally the space open for truly well-made and well-loved adaptations. The most recent take, and the step that will probably make video game adaptations become a regular thing now, is The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

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Review: ‘Shazam: Fury of the Gods’ is DC’s Newest Godlike Blunder

The DCEU, since its inception with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, has been criticized for a multitude of things. Bad casting, bad directing, bad writing, bad storytelling all around, just to name a few. Trying to create an MCU-like universe for the DC heroes seems simple enough, yet DC’s try at it has been lacking in nearly every way. Some hope for a return to Snyder, let him finish his universe, most are sighing with relief that James Gunn has been brought in to just not do this anymore. My biggest gripe with the franchise so far has been the fact that its stories are at odds with the themes. They come out of nowhere, or aren’t developed, and these lackluster and underdeveloped themes create bad characters, bad story cohesion, and ineffective world building. Shazam: Fury of the Gods is the latest in the DCEU lineup, and you know what, I was pleasantly surprised with how much worse it was than I expected. 

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Review: ‘Creed 3’ is a Rocky-less Movie Made Masterfully

Rocky Balboa, possibly the most famous film sportsman ever, his story of will, earning your place, and being the underdog has never failed to amuse the world (maybe not Rocky V, but you get the point). After three decades of films, the franchise went cold after Rocky Balboa. Until the sequel franchise in 2015, a spin-off of the original story. Creed, a sequel series about Apollo Creed’s youngest child, and only one out of wedlock, a stain on the legacy of a great man, a mistake trying to prove himself without the name of his dad, and yet claiming it as his own. Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) was in this follow up series for the first two films, where he played the trainer and mentor of title character, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), but due to some creative differences following the tone of this new installment, Stallone bowed out of film production early, and it was left in the hands of Michael B. Jordan, who took it upon himself to direct this new installment of the franchise.

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Review: ‘Knock at the Cabin’ is a Good Thriller but a Watered-Down Adaptation

M. Night Shyamalan releases are interesting. His early career is lined with amazing films with crazy twists that shift your perspective of the film, and then he released The Last Airbender and a couple other flushers, and his career has been shaky since. A lot of people really liked Split, a solid horror movie with a rising star in Anya Taylor-Joy. Then Glass became the movie people regretted was ever made, and Old was just, it wasn’t great. So, coming into Knock at the Cabin, most had the same coin flip mentality as I did: will this be something great, or will this be something that is simply there? I am here to say, I don’t know. Knock at the Cabin is an interesting film in many respects, yet also a boring film in many other respects.

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Spencer Malmberg’s Top 10 Films of 2022

2022 was certainly a year for cinema, there were a lot of movies that came out, both in theaters and digitally through streaming services with a lot of really good films, and a lot of really bad films. Notable flops include the works of Marvel’s 4th Thor attempt and the weird inclusion of Morbius into the Sony catalog that no one was asking for. Also, worth noting the thousands of awful low budget romcoms on streaming services where the only claim to fame is the fact that they got an old Disney Channel teen to be in a movie where they make sex jokes. Also, Jurassic World was bad. 

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Review: ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’ Speeds Back Into Video Game Movie Royalty

Just like the superhero movie and the reboot, video game movies are undoubtedly one of the biggest blockbuster seat-fillers of newer cinema. But video game movies aren’t yet as highly recognized as superhero films or remakes because, the video game adaptation sub-genre has a horrible track record with critical and audiences reviews. The vast majority of these movies rarely reach a 50% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with anything at around a 70%, or a C grade, being seen as a better adaptation. Last month we saw Uncharted, another video game adaptation, and it proved to us yet again that studios sure love throwing money in places and hoping to have it returned to them. The outliers of this genre usually don’t disappoint though, whether it is the animated Angry Birds 2, which weirdly surprised audiences, or Detective Pikachu, a live action adaptation that reminds us why those games should never go hyper-realistic. 

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Review: ‘The Batman’ is a Perfect Batman Film

I am a big superhero fan. I have been since I was young, due to my father loving all things sci-fi and comic book related and passing that onto me. Like most other people, Batman has always been my go-to. All forms of Batman are unique, with different directors, different men under the cowl, different villains, and varying messages and themes. Every Batman iteration is different even Batman from the same iteration but separate films are different from each other. I could go on for a while about the original live-action film with Adam West, or how Tim Burton’s Batman series was screwed up after he was dropped as director, or Christopher Nolan’s near-perfect trilogy that, while amazing, ignored a lot of what made Batman truly himself in place of better villainy and theming. 

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Spencer Malmberg’s Top 10 Films of 2021

2021 was honestly not my favorite year for movies, and we are going into a highly disappointing Oscar season by the unredeemable amount of nominations for Don’t Look Up. I did like a lot of movies this year though; I also watched way more movies from 2021 then any year I have before. At the time of writing this I have marked down 82 movies from 2021 on my Letterboxd, which is a crazy amount of times I sat in a theater. There wasn’t a lot of box office success, and definitely an even higher impact on Oscar pick season in the late fall and winter movie runs, but it was fun to watch a lot of very different stories and look at the different techniques in which filmmakers go about their movies.

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