movie review – Syndication Server

Good Burger 2 delivers the best kind of nostalgic throwback possible

The new Good Burger movie is everything you’d hope it would be.

As our greater culture begins to transition from shamelessly mining the very last square inch of real estate from the 1980s to reanimating the good, bad and ugly of the 1990s, it felt inevitable that Nickelodeon would try and make plenty of plays for all the millennials who can’t quite let go of the trinkets and doodads that bind them to their childhoods.

Most of the time, shamelessly pandering to the past produces mediocre results. Much like a haphazardly assembled McDouble that’s been sitting under the heat lamp for far too long, the assembly just feels robotic and tastes craven.

Studios bring back something you love by just blowing off the dust and repackaging it like it’s some sort of fresh experience that will also give you exactly what you had before. It’s a lazy paradox that plagues artistic growth and reeks of thoughtless consumerism.

However, by some chance of a holiday miracle, Good Burger 2 is not that, not by a long shot. In fact, it might be the polar opposite.

L-R: Kenan Thompson as Dex and Kel Mitchell as Ed in Good Burger 2, streaming on Paramount+, 2023. Photo Credit: Vanessa Clifton/Nickelodeon/Paramount+.

You cannot begin to fathom the relief in the collective millennial apparatus that, in this day-and-age of cash-grab nostalgic pablum, the Good Burger sequel would become a standard-bearer for how to expand and respect an old, fuzzy feeling while justifying the act of making you feel it again.

Be it the impossibly satisfying reunion of Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell, or the fact that original writers Kevin Kopelow and Heath Seifert’s script preserves the laugh-a-second humor and the anarchistic spirit of the old Good Burger sketches and movie.

Heck, maybe it’s just that lightning has struck twice, and that some good things in this world are just allowed to stay just as good, even after all these years.

No matter what it is, Good Burger 2 is remarkable in the way it actually achieves where so many similar efforts have failed. It’s somehow even better than last year’s Beavis and Butt-Head sequel, and that’s as high of praise as you can offer to a sequel of this particular style.

Kel Mitchell as Ed in Good Burger 2, streaming on Paramount+, 2023. Photo Credit: Vanessa Clifton/Nickelodeon/Paramount+.

So much of this sequel’s success is owed to the comedic timing of Thompson and Mitchell, who haven’t missed a step after all these years apart.

While Thompson has gone onto immortality as one of the best Saturday Night Live cast members in that show’s history, Mitchell has been sorely missed in this format for the way he can bend your funny bone to his will in unexpected ways.

Once you see him back as Ed, as righteously chipper and pleasantly oblivious as he was back in the 1990s, the whole world just feels right.

Thompson and Mitchell are both excellent here, but it’s the latter in particular who delivers perhaps the funniest performance this year outside of Ryan Gosling in Barbie. It’s simply unreal how well Mitchell slips right back in and delivers an onslaught of deep belly laughs in a big Good Burger-branded bag.

L-R: Emily Hinkler as Cindy, Elizabeth Hinkler as Mindy, Alex R. Hibbert as Ed2 and Kenan Thompson as Dex in Good Burger 2, streaming on Paramount+, 2023. Photo Credit: Vanessa Clifton/Nickelodeon/Paramount+.

Mitchell was always an ace for Ed’s physical comedy and turnaround logic, but it’s the beating heart of the character that gave the role its depth.

Ed was always a morally grounded and simple pleasures type of burgerman who just wanted all of the dudes of the world to enjoy what they had and who they had it with. While it was a quaint outlook with the world as it was in the 1990s, it feels downright revolutionary now.

Whereas the original film skewered the gargantuan grotesqueness of 1990s franchise culture, Good Burger 2 takes a sharp swerve into the anxiety of our automated age.

While you might not have pegged a Good Burger movie to feature some of the most scathing satire lately about the relationship between soulless corporations and the common worker, you might want to flip that expectation patty. The film’s foundational themes are interesting and smart.

Good Burger 2 tastes exactly how you remembered it, and it’s made with the same love and care of how it was crafted all those years ago. Maybe that’s the secret sauce in this day and age of relentless nostalgia; actually putting in the work to cook up a delicious experience out of a tried-and-true old recipe.

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The Creator might be a hair familiar, but it’s still a soulful, stirring spectacle

The Creator might feel a little familiar, but it’s still a rigorous vision from a strong filmmaker.

The best kind of science-fiction comes with dirt underneath the fingernails. In our sanitized blockbuster landscape, we’ve lost sight of the rust that keeps the machine honest, and films like The Creator serve as vital reminders of why we keep excavating the dark side of the moon for fantastical stories that remind us so much more of the world we’re in than we expect.

Gareth Edwards’ latest project hems close to the garment of sci-fi’s past, chopping up elements of stories you’ve heard before and visuals that have struck your imagination in the past. The filmmaker openly cited masterworks like Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner in forging his latest epic, and it’s very evident throughout how direct those homages are.

Is it to the point of being defeating? Not necessarily. Genre films continually build on the remnants of the past, as you can’t enter The Matrix without Ghost in the Shell and you don’t soar with Star Wars without the works of Akira Kurosawa and Forbidden Planet. The Creator‘s cybernetic gumbo covers ideas that have been contemplated from sci-fi minds ranging from Isaac Asimov to Steven Spielberg. However, Edwards’ uncanny sense of scope, dedication to his crafted world and ability to ring genuine emotion from the well-worn tropes the plot is built on help buoy the familiarity.

If anything, Edwards’ latest film establishes him as the true heir apparent to James Cameron. While Edwards’ hasn’t quite made a film yet that rival some of Cameron’s stone-cold classics, this film feels like its in dialogue with Cameron’s Terminator movies, his Avatar franchise and Aliens.

The usual suspects are the same: a gruff military presence rooted in American exceptionalism, an enemy we can’t quite understand until we’re embedded with their POV, a war raging for the future of humankind for some reason or another. If you throw in Blade Runner‘s seedy backdrop of futuristic robots intermingling with cyberpunk cityscapes and the amoral jungles of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam, you’ll kind of get what Edwards is going for here. Again, it’s a film very indebted to what inspires it, at times to narrative fault.

Where The Creator ultimately finds its footing is with the hyper-relevance of artificial intelligence, with the supposed opposition humanity faces here a plethora of rouge machines powered by an A.I. system designed for our benefit. Being that this is a modern twist on the Vietnam movie, you can probably guess where Edwards’ commentary goes with on the supposed dangers of A.I. and the uniquely Western sensibility to rush in with insurgency into a foreign landscape we can’t quite understand past our basic fears and crass preconceptions. The Creator is a really good movie, but it’s not particularly subtle one.

Those creepy robots in the SoFi Stadium stands for Chargers – Dolphins? They were a movie promotion

John David Washington is starting to be the go-to guy to lead an original sci-fi blockbuster after anchoring Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, probably due to his ability to maneuver through a surreal atmosphere with quick wit and a very sincere appreciation for his character’s emotional scars. He’s not quite the ferocious presence his dad Denzel is, but that almost heightens the little nuances of his reserved manner. He’s a little more of a calculated presence on screen, and that fits exceptionally well for genre films like this.

While Edwards and Chris Weitz’s screenplay indeed feels the weight of so much informing its universe and storytelling, you cannot deny the fact that Edwards is one of our great studio filmmakers when it comes to making the audience feel very small in his heavenly catastrophes of robots and monsters.

Only matched by perhaps Cameron, Nolan, Spielberg and Denis Villeneuve for working directors who make big movies with overwhelming senses of scale, The Creator finds Edwards building on the grand tragedy of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the shocking terror of Godzilla and the intimate world-flip of Monsters. He almost combines all of those elements into a Cameron-esque extravaganza, and he does so on a reasonable $80 million budget that would make most superhero epics blush.

Finding ways to be economic and still knock your audience out of their seat with breathtaking visuals is hard to do, and Edwards absolutely stuns with his visual landscapes. It helps to have a virtuoso behind the camera like Dune‘s Greig Fraser, who understands how to capture the genre like few can. Like Nolan, Edwards’ films are made for IMAX.

In a day-and-age where meta-narrative has swallowed up so much of the tentpole filmmaking we enjoy, it’s nice to get a movie like The Creator. It takes everything about it seriously, and it does so with real soul. You can forgive a little déjà vu, if only because what we recall is what we so often long for with transportive experiences like this. He’s picking up where Neill Blomkamp left off with his dusty, desperate sociopolitical trilogy of District 9, Elysium and Chappie. We miss quality films like that, ones that take us into not-so-abstract futures with not-so-uncommon sci-fi templates.

While The Creator can’t fully shake not-so-distant memories of sci-fi’s past, Edwards is just too talented a filmmaker, too in-tune with uncompromising story decisions and genuine, painful catharsis, to botch an assignment like this. By film’s end, you’re as rapt with this fight for freedom as you are watching the Na’vi of Pandora protect their homeland from greedy corporate interests. If Edwards is the best chance we’ve got to continue Cameron’s legacy of heady sci-fi and firm tugs at the heartstrings, then we’ll absolutely take it. This creation, while imperfect, is still something special to behold.

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is an awestruck adventure for all times

Indiana Jones is back for a sweeping, meditative finale.

It’s really hard to make everyone happy when it comes to making movies. No matter how hard you try, you’re bound to run into resistance from any avenue you take. It doesn’t make it right, but it certainly makes it so.

MORE: Every Indiana Jones movie, ranked, and The Last Crusade isn’t first

For Lucasfilm, it’s been more than 20 years of trying to appease all sides of all expectations. Whether it’s with Star Wars or Indiana Jones, you either want what’s comfortable or you want something daring. You either want to recapture the nostalgia of what you had when you were a kid, or you want a subversive exercise in challenging what’s come before with new ideas.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny straddles a very careful line between one of the most iconic templates in film history and a very peculiar moment in history. Like Indy walking on a rickety bridge over a river full of crocodiles, the film has to do a lot while still trying to stay true to itself.

It’s somewhat of a miracle that this latest Indiana Jones adventure finds what it does, especially with longtime director Steven Spielberg not in the director’s chair for the first time in the five-film run. Spielberg’s first four Indiana Jones adventures are all singular works, as they call came at various points in the legendary auteur’s career. Filmmaker James Mangold is the first person ever to excavate the caves of this franchise with fresh eyes.

If anything, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny somehow finds a way to give everyone what they want out of this series in some fashion or another. Do you want a globetrotting spectacle with creepy-crawlies, Nazi-punching, breakneck chases and treasures beyond belief? You’ve got it. Do you want a film that feels starkly different than what’s come before it, even down to the way the adventure is paced? Mangold can do that.

Much of the criticism for the previous Indiana Jones film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels disingenuine as time has passed, haphazard internet memes born into slapdash talking points without much weight. That film was Spielberg at his wiliest, a spiritual successor to Temple of Doom combined with the filmmaker’s endearing homage for the sock-hop society.

This latest Indiana Jones film feels right in place with The Last Crusade, as Mangold and company nail the contemplative nature of all of these films. While it’s easy to get fixated on the boulder chases and the historical artifacts, the Indiana Jones films have always been about discovering a world bigger than you. Harrison Ford has always brought the smirk and irreverence we love him for, but he’s also well aware of Indy’s inner awe for his journeys.

Despite the grandiosity of the adventures, Indiana Jones is just an average guy with a whip and fedora, trying to make sense of the supernatural, the terrifying and the downright divine converging on his moment in history. The movies are always made by Ford’s disarming sense of wonder and fear when things really hit the fan and all you can do is look in disbelief.

Mangold’s film doesn’t quite have the same momentum as the other Indy films, but it doesn’t need to. It finds perhaps Ford’s best performance in the series to hang its narrative, one that finds our hero dealing with the weight of his personal history and that of the world he’s in. He’s a man lost in time, and it’s fitting that he’s still battling with those nefarious Nazis over a device that could alter the course of history.

There’s more than enough here to satisfy the lifelong fan, just as there’s more than enough here for folks yearning for a fresh take on Indy’s galavanting. Ford’s more than up to the task, as are newcomers Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Jones’ goddaughter, a chip off the old block) and Mads Mikkelsen (a dastardly Nazi scientist from Jones’ past who wants to turn back the clock on the failures of the Third Reich).

The balancing act can get understandably tricky in spots for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but it makes it across the bridge in plenty of style. Like the films that come before it, this latest Indiana Jones film stays true to the title character. Through all the hand-wringing about what these movies are supposed to be, they always seem to get right what matters most.

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is a magnificent study of grief and aliens

Wes Anderson’s latest film Asteroid City is a marvelous study of grief and aliens.

Like all great directors, Wes Anderson understands that there’s no better place to be sad than the American West. Anderson’s latest film Asteroid City coats on the sadness like light pink paint on The Grand Budapest Hotel.

While his style has been parodied of late on social media as being emotionally despondent and blandly schematic, the brilliant Asteroid City might be the best example yet of why the auteur’s films beat from bleeding hearts, ones carefully hidden in ornate mazes designed with precision and reverence. It’s a film that’s as achingly melancholic as it is deeply funny, showing why Anderson is one of the true experts for tonal balance.

More so than he ever has in his career, the director seems fascinated with using Asteroid City to meditate on the nature of death and our long-standing struggle to cope with the gobsmacking craters that get left in our lives when someone we love passes on. While The Life Aquatic‘s Steve Zissou used his grief to fuel a revenge hunt on the jaguar shark that ate his best friend, Asteroid City finds its central characters running from grief like it’s a runaway locomotive barreling down a lonesome desert railway.

Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features

Well, it’s the characters from the mind of Western playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), whose play Asteroid City is being brought to life in a televised production hosted by Bryan Cranston’s nameless emcee. Yes, Anderson seems to be having a bit of fun with critiques that his films are fussily rendered by taking his latest plot and stacking itself in on each other like different layers of dreams in Inception. The film bounces from the technicolor story of Asteroid City to the Cranston-narrated interludes of how the production came to be.

One moment, we’ll be in a dusty faux-rest stop in the middle of Arizona nowhere with a newly widowed Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman, sensational) and his four kids as the eldest attends a Junior Stargazers convention. The next, Anderson will cut to a black-and-white aside of Cranston telling us about how Earp the Asteroid City playwright met renowned actor Jones Hall (also Schwartzman), the man who seemingly inspired and later played Earp’s Augie Steenbeck.

Asteroid City takes its science-fiction roots seriously, with Anderson openly paying homage to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the Junior Stargazers convention quickly dissolves into a government quarantine after a very timid alien drops in unexpectedly during an evening gaze at the cosmos in the very asteroid crater where the town gets its name from. However, Anderson finds so much more pathos in what happens after we see the alien than Spielberg did in the grand meeting.

Anderson’s film will spin your head around like a top as it navigates the precious relationship stories have to real-life traumas. We learn from stories because they’ve been written by people who have felt the emotions on the page.

While a story is merely a microcosm of themes and experiences scattered about with characters that may or may not relate to us, an artist’s work to bring those themes and experiences to us is all at once alienating and magnetizing. We feel their pain even though we may never know where it comes from, an act of isolation can breed such communal power.

Asteroid City bites off a whopping piece of rhubarb pie with its narrative overlays, but it rewards those who are finely in tune with Anderson’s rhythms. Not everything is going to make sense in Asteroid City, but it’s not supposed to. While his films have been accused of being too mechanic to elicit empathy, what’s more realistic than a dry, reserved season of grieving?

Life isn’t like the movies, but Anderson’s films have always found bracing humanity in those little moments of devastation where characters look at each other with heavy eyes that tell more than five-ton books ever could. Then, when the intimate conversation starts, it’s a tidal wave that sweeps you off your feet into Anderson’s oceans of rich emotions.

The beauty of Asteroid City comes with how it studies the indivisible relationship between processing the unexplainable and being there for people through the confusion. We’re not always going to understand what’s going on around us, whether it’s questioning why a character does something in a play or in why someone we held dear had to die so soon.

However, most people can’t help but want to be there for someone in a time of need. The questions of life may not ever get solutions that satisfy logic or reason, but the answers always come in the form of helping hands. We’re not alone in Asteroid City, as Anderson’s devastatingly hopeful film sneaks up behind you like a hug out of sight. The long, dusty road from grief might be a scary one, but at least we go on it together.

Nicolas Cage’s Dracula horror-comedy Renfield is a bloody good time

Nicolas Cage is a fantastic Dracula in the new horror-comedy Renfield.

As much as the new horror-comedy Renfield wants to key in on the hilarity of Dracula’s long-suffering assistant standing up to his boss, Nicolas Cage can’t help but bring the heat.

Indeed, Renfield‘s first aim is to amp up the absurdity of its amicable title character (Nicholas Hoult) deciding that it’s time to tell Count Dracula (Cage) that he’s tired of his putrid working conditions and the legendary vampire’s snarling attitude and lack of gratitude.

However, thanks to an impressively realized performance from the Oscar-winning Cage as the nefarious bloodsucker, Renfield finds something deeper, much more sinister in the nature of toxic relationships and in the terror that the famous vampire has brought to the silver screen for generations.

In what is Cage’s first major studio project in ages, the actor brings his patented blend of German Expressionism and Japanese kabuki theater to the Bela Lugosi/Christopher Lee austerity of Dracula. Cage’s Drac is a grade-A jerk, a bloodthirsty shadow-dweller who wants to take over the world for some reason and slash and dash anyone who gets in his way.

Cage’s manic performances have always been rooted in rigorous acting styles, ones that force off-kilter facial expressions and wily vocal inflections to create something outlandish that’s actually quite focused in on raw emotion and plot-centered gravitas. He stretches the possibility of the performance to make it more memorable and to make his films more lively. Even if he doesn’t always hit the mark, you’ll never accuse Cage of being boring, and you might appreciate his energy more after the credits roll.

The actor understands the assignment in Renfield as well as anyone could, creating a theatrical Dracula that’s seeped in menace and pettiness. He’ll draw you in with an anglerfish’s charm and bite you with an apex predator’s hunger. It’s one of the all-time portrayals of Transylvania’s worst in a movie.

Outside of Cage’s brilliant villainy, Renfield is plenty of fun. Filmmaker Chris McKay understands what he’s got in Cage and Hoult, who takes the nice-guy vibes Renfield gives off and meshes them with the hysterically uncomfortable nature of his macabre job (finding victims for Dracula to feed on).

McKay also wisely allots the dorkier aspects of the film room to breathe, like the ancient Renfield ditching his Victorian garb for a Macy’s sweater and using those cheesy motivational posters you see at dental offices to decorate his away-from-Dracula apartment.

It’s a tonal lurch through Dracula’s castle at midnight to try and balance all of these genres, but Cage gets it more than most any actors could. He knows how to bring the horror and lean in on the gag all in one take, and McKay’s hyper-violent fight sequences rarely detract from their inherent silliness of Renfield’s quest. Hoult’s chipper demeanor in the face of buckets of blood around him only heightens what Renfield is trying to do.

Anything else going on in the movie takes a backseat to whatever Cage and Hoult are doing. Awkwafina leads a subplot through a dedicated cop taking on a New Orleans crime syndicate that Dracula later teams up with, and she does what she’s asked and admirably plays it straight when it really could’ve been easy not to with all the vampire-ness and such.

Everything falls on the Renfield-Dracula dynamic. That duo brings some hearty chuckles, like when Dracula hides out at Renfield’s apartment while sipping on a bloody martini with eyeball ice cubes. They also find the film’s best moments of freakiness, like when Dracula terrorizes Renfield’s emotional support group one unfortunate night.

It’s a fascinating idea to explore the nature of bad bosses and toxic partners through the lens of one of horror’s most notable pairings, but Renfield does enough outside of its lead performances to give folks a bloody good time at the movies. Thanks to Cage and Hoult, the film’s bite has more meaning.

Ben Affleck’s Air is the next great American sports movie

Ben Affleck’s Air is the next great American sports movie.

One of the more classic American sensibilities is our persistent stubbornness to give up on something when we believe in it.

You can track it all the way back to the Revolutionary War to find a bunch of scrappy, powdered-wig wearing forefathers who were so against paying those ridiculous taxes on their goods that they’d go to battle for freedom.

For all of the flaws that engulf the idea of “American exceptionalism,” we are an exceptionally headstrong people when we want something.

Ben Affleck’s Air walks the fine line in extolling these virtues. On one hand, there is a direct thrill in watching Affleck’s dramatization of how once-underdog shoe company Nike usurped the basketball competition giants of Adidas and Converse to land Michael Jordan’s sponsorship.

Affleck’s as gifted behind the camera as he is in front of it, and he knows how to ring from history a snappy, monologue-filled headrush of racing against the clock and defying the odds on the sheer power of belief and savvy corporate maneuvering.

You get all the archetypes of the underdog story: the guy we root for who powers himself on good-faith tenets (Matt Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro), the benevolent authority figure who pushes our protagonist when necessary (Affleck’s Phil Knight), the supporting players who fuel our protagonist’s efforts (Jason Bateman’s Rob Strasser, Chris Tucker’s Howard White, Matthew Maher’s Peter Moore) and the moral center who makes everything happen (Viola Davis’ Deloris Jordan).

Ben Affleck as Phil Knight in Air Photo: COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS © AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC

The villain is more of an obelisk, a system that seeks to use sponsorship to build up product rather than the other way around. Vaccaro’s genius in seeing Michael Jordan’s potential was understanding that he was the marquee event, not the sneaker he was sporting. As a couple of our main players note throughout the film, it’s not about the shoe as much as the person who was wearing it.

As your sneaker closet may spoil for you, Nike succeeded in courting Jordan against the firm pushes of Adidas and Converse. The Air Jordan absolutely changed the basketball shoe world. The deal revolutionized the way we market products around athletes and forever altered the means of compensation on sponsorship deals to build up the individual as much as the company. In a little boardroom in Oregon, sports shifted for good.

Affleck’s film successfully rallies around the underdog narrative with the same gleeful disruption of sports movies like Jerry Maguire and Moneyball. Those pillars of sporting films – the former fictional, the latter inspired by real life – dealt directly with merry marauders who pushed against the old guard of athletics and found a new way forward.

Air is an outstanding example of how to execute that story with enough gravitas to get you cheering in your seat when a billion-dollar company is able to schedule a meeting with an NBA player for a marketing pitch.

It’s a hair-raising, chest-pumping sprint to the finish, built on inspirational platitudes and fiercely written exchanges about ideals. Alex Convery’s script would make Aaron Sorkin proud, and its entertainingly clinical dismantling of power structures would have Steven Soderbergh foaming at the mouth.

Matthew Maher as Peter Moore, Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro and Jason Bateman as Rob Strasser in AIR Photo: ANA CARBALLOSA © AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC

Damon is the perfect fixture point, with he and Affleck’s scenes together channeling that uncanny chemistry that they’ll always have. They’re the closest thing we have to a Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau partnership. Tucker, Bateman and Maher, all tremendous, further humanize Vaccaro’s quest, and Davis turns in one of her better performances as the Jordan family’s steely, empathetic matriarch who is hellbent on making sure her son’s generational potential is realized on the most just path.

Throw in Affleck’s quirky take on Knight and Chris Messina’s smarmy, full-throated imagining of sports superagent David Falk, and you’ve got one of the finest ensembles we’ve had in ages. This film can’t work without its cast.

Affleck’s direction is as precise and energetic as it was with Argo, another story about determined Americans racing against the clock to defy the odds. However, his film isn’t shallow enough to not address the Nike-wearing elephant in the room.

Indeed, while there is clear inspiration to the Jordan/Nike story, there is also the finicky trouble with hyping up a billion-dollar corporation’s quest to make a crap ton of more money. The means of production so often leaves behind the worker who makes it possible, and Air savvily takes the Air Jordan deal and adds vital context in the third act about the thankless system that largely governs our economic groundswells.

Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis as Deloris Jordan in AIR Photo: COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS © AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC

The film shows that Deloris Jordan wanted her son to get a cut of the Air Jordan shoe sales because she knew Michael was going to be a megastar, and she didn’t want him to get lost in the tidal wave of unpredictable American commerce. Jordan is one of the richest athletes to ever play because of the terms of the Nike shoe deal, and many athletes have benefitted from that over time.

Affleck’s film tries to show the importance of what the Air Jordan deal gave athletes all while making the quest to secure that sponsorship as exciting as overtime in a Game 7 of an NBA Finals. The film is too smart to ignore the corporate greed and risky optimism that can fuel our biggest corporate achievements, but it’s also nuanced enough to celebrate the marriage of good-faith economics and pure belief.

The Air Jordan deal left plenty of winners, and it’s easy to root for the victory. You have to remember that this is a story told through Hollywood’s purview, one that can’t fully unpack the complexities of Nike and its business dealings. However, Air can unpack the brazen foundation that builds all of our competitive successes, and Affleck’s film does so masterfully. It’s a film that inspires you to fly all while reminding you what it takes to have wings.

Scream VI’s ridiculousness is exactly right for the franchise at this point

Scream VI is exactly what it needs to be at this point in the franchise.

There is a certain point in Scream VI where the film willingly contorts itself into metaverse Everything Bagel from Everything Everywhere All at Once.

As two law enforcement officers go down a line of all the different killers from all five of the previous Scream films, you can tell there’s a palpable sense of “oh my gosh, are we really still doing this?” floating in the air. Indeed, the meta-granddaddy film franchise openly starts to wonder what it’s still doing here.

That’s the undercurrent that makes Scream VI work, an expectedly gruesome piece of horror comedy that honors its roots by vigorously questioning them. If any film series is going to lament that might be starting to run out of gas, it’s Scream, and there is definitely a standard to uphold in self-awareness.

Much like the second film in Wes Craven’s landmark franchise, Scream VI gets nastier with the violence. The parallels between that 1997 sequel and this one are aggressive. Both films followed the Woodsboro survivors as they ventured to college, and both films deal with the repercussions of surviving a Ghostface killing spree. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett take their jobs so seriously to hype up the metanarrative of it all that this feels as much a winking remake of Scream 2 as 2022’s Scream did of the original.

Lost on this series is the ability to absolutely shock, which happens when the getaway car has loses the tread on the screeching tires. A day will come when the Scream films get sucked so far into its self-awareness that it becomes impossible to take a breath without commenting on it.

Jasmin Savoy Brown in *Scream VI*; Paramount Pictures

Thankfully, Scream VI does enough with the New York slasher set-pieces to justify Ghostface’s sixth terrorizing, including one absolutely harrowing sequence on a subway line that will leave you frightened to travel underground anytime soon.

Scream VI feels a bit shaggier than some of the films that came before it, a bit too eager at times to jump into the mayhem without pacing itself. It’s hard to do these legacy sequels with new characters and maintain the same rhythms that came before, ones that admittedly worked better with the original players. Franchise leads Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega do sound work as the film’s primary scream queens. Barrera’s Sam Carpenter still grapples with her place in the universe as original Scream killer Billy Loomis’ daughter, and Ortega struggles with being looped into all of this as Sam’s half-sister.

Jasmin Savoy Brown’s Mindy has taken the Randy Meeks mantle with aplomb, and there is a sense that these films just could not work without her hysterical running commentary on what’s happening in the movie.

It’s with characters like Mindy that writers James Vanderbilt and Busick can really poke holes in the seriousness. Scream movies have to be one step ahead of themselves, always willing to self-edit when necessary. The real genius of keeping these movies going is being able to openly mock that these Ghostface killings keep happening the way they do and with the same exact people. Outside of Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s gnarly knack for staging Ghostface attacks, their two films in the series have done admirable work trying to comment on our incessant need to keep franchises going when they clearly could’ve stopped eons ago.

Will Scream ever fall victim to what it’s making fun of? It’s likely, and that’s almost kind of the beauty of it. With inevitable sequels probably coming (these are cheap to make and rake in the cash), it’ll be fascinating to see when these films finally wave the white flag and admit defeat. It’ll be a glorious tailspin when that does happen, but Scream VI does plenty to keep the party going.

If you’re a die-hard fan of Woodsboro’s finest, this latest Scream will subvert just a few expectations while fulfilling plenty of creature comforts. If you’re wondering when Ghostface will finally put the knives back in the kitchen, you’ll hopefully find it amusing that this movie series is asking the same question. Scream being its own trash-talking ombudsman will keep these films alive for as long as they’re needed. The filmmakers can take the horror seriously while letting the writers suck the air out of the room when it’s desperately needed.

80 for Brady review: A surprising combination of charm, chuckles and chutzpah

80 for Brady is an easy win for all involved.

If you want to understand the unbeatable charm of 80 for Brady, watch Sally Field chow down on hot wings in a contest hosted by Guy Fieri.

In a world where we’ve lost touch with how to build consistent studio comedies for theaters, it seems strange to imagine that there aren’t 500 more movies like this. You know, just watching an elderly screen icon doing something silly can bring forth laughter you never know you had in you.

That’s the fun of 80 for Brady, a sports-centric comedy with four undisputed entertainment legends who just want to have a good time watching Tom Brady play football. If you can’t find at least something enjoyable in watching a stoned Rita Moreno walk around a mansion in a Venetian mask to discover a room full of Guy Fieris playing poker, you need to loosen up a bit.

What’s refreshing about 80 for Brady is the commitment to the concept. It’s easy to get a bunch of hyper-talented comedic actors like Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda together and let them just do their thing. Tomlin and Fonda have been doing that together for decades, going all the way back to 1980’s 9 to 5. It’d have been easy to just throw these four ladies in any sort of situational comedy and let it all just work itself out. However, the feisty screenplay from Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern helps the broader humor all blend in together with the Super Bowl-related shenanigans.

They do have a real-life story to kinda-sorta consider, even though there are clear fantastical licenses the writers had to take with what inspired this. You can’t really make that much of a movie just about four seniors heading to Houston to watch Brady and the New England Patriots take on the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl 51. You can, however, delightfully embellish just how that might’ve gone down.

There isn’t a nuanced bone in this movie’s body, and it’s all the better for it. Playing it as broad as possible allows 80 for Brady to maximize its loonier plot developments, and it gives the primary quartet plenty of room to just let their organic comedic chops take over whatever scene is going on. Moreno has been doing this since the 1950s, and she’s still as spry as ever. You could argue, even though Tomlin and Fonda are the comedic titans here, that Moreno and Field get the biggest laughs.

While any Falcons fan attending might want to excuse themselves for a bathroom break during the film’s actual Super Bowl sequences, there’s enough for even the most begrudged Dirty Bird fan to find something pleasant in a lighthearted comedy that’s very sure of itself.

How is Brady, you might wonder? While he’s certainly not going to have an acting career like the one former NFL cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha has built for himself, he holds his own with what he’s asked to do. He and Tomlin share one sweet moment toward the end of the movie that does make you wonder if Brady does have something in him for acting, but more than likely, he won’t grace the screen with any movie that doesn’t have his name in the title.

Watching 80 for Brady is a bit like joining in for a game night at your grandma’s retirement village. There’s just something nice about watching an entire room of elderly people crack jokes and sip the bubbly on a Saturday afternoon. If you have a grandma, take her to see this one. The smile on her face will undoubtedly make the one on yours grow even bigger.

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M3GAN is a dastardly sleek horror comedy about kiddo tech gone awry

The latest Blumhouse chiller is playing nationwide.

If you’ve ever wondered if your kids spend a little too much time in front of a screen, meet M3GAN.

The Child’s Play for the “Can I play games on your iPad?” generation, M3GAN is a spunky satire of a world where it’s really not that hard to believe that a cyborg doll could go on a murdering spree. We live in interconnected times, and the evolution of the “screen parent” has gone from plopping your unsupervised kids in front of the television to sending them out into a technological wonderland of responsive entertainment.

M3GAN imagines what would happen if your kid’s toy talked back. Pushing the limits of artificial intelligence engineering, a toy designer (Get Out‘s Allison Williams) designs the marquee mech-moppet with a hope to make parents’ lives easier. The M3GAN doll can understand a child’s emotional bandwidth and respond accordingly, teach them important chunks of information and life skills, supervise them as if it were a babysitter and carry on conversations about anything the doll’s processing mechanism can understand. Nothing could go wrong, right?

Williams’ inventor gets the perfect opportunity to test M3GAN’s abilities when she assumes custody of her niece Cady (Violet McGraw), whose parents have tragically died in an automobile accident. That poor kid takes to M3GAN like a duck takes to water, but as the film slowly reveals, the two might start to get a little too close. Part of M3GAN’s programming makes her, shall we say, hypersensitive to protecting Cady’s emotional and physical wellbeing. Being that it’s a creepy looking robot doll and all, M3GAN resorts to some unsavory protection methods and starts racking up a body count.

Rather than just revel in the B-level horror hilarity of a sassy M3GAN doll chasing a smarmy toy executive with a paper cutter blade, director Gerald Johnstone and Malignant co-scribe Akela Cooper find fascinating subtext in the film’s programming. It’s a smarter replicant of some of its evil toy peers, digging into the unholy alliance parents can sometimes make with the distractions they give their children. Cooper’s script hammers in the absurdity of allowing a computer to raise your kid, and has plenty of bones to pick with the absentee parenting that builds this kind of culture.

While a M3GAN doll might seem far-fetched, advancements in A.I. could make a creation like this much more plausible in the years to come. The more and more busy parents find technological outs on being present in their kids’ lives, the more a movie like M3GAN becomes eerily prescient.

While M3GAN certainly has its gleefully meme-able moments, the PG-13 ratings serves as a bit of a parental lock on a more gnarly spectacle. Unlike 2019’s tech-fueled Child’s Play remake, this film is more than content to leave you waiting on some of the more ludicrous angles of its universe for the inevitable follow-ups. However, techo Chucky doesn’t quite make you want to leap from your theater seat and hoot and holler like M3GAN. She’s a dastardly sassy killing machine, ready to bust a move before busting out one of your eyeballs. She’s destined for some sort of place in the pantheon of killer toys, even with just one movie in.

If you could imagine what would’ve happened if Woody the cowboy did his “play nice” speech to Sid on a bad day, that’s what you’d get with M3GAN. It’s a horror comedy that plays it silly but has much more sinister intentions. If you can find a relatively packed theater on a Saturday evening, movie nights in January are made for flicks like M3GAN.

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Avatar: The Way of Water is a deep, delightful dive back into Pandora

One ticket to Pandora, please.

Out of any of his contemporaries, filmmaker James Cameron has always found ways to break the invisible glass between his audience and his movies. Immersion is one thing, but Cameron’s films collapse your reality. One moment, you’re a doomed passenger aboard the Titanic. Another, you’re fending for your life from hungry Xenomorphs. The screen is always more a suggestion than a barrier.

Avatar: The Way of Water is his visual zenith. Thirteen years after transporting moviegoers to Pandora, Cameron now dunks them into the planet’s teeming oceans. The most beautiful dreams can’t really capture what it’s like to swim off Cameron’s imagined Metkayina reef. The best movies make imaginary worlds feel real. Avatar: The Way of Water makes the auditorium feel like the dream, and Pandora’s aquatic wonderland feel like home. There really hasn’t ever been something quite like this.

Disney/20th Century Studios

The debate of Avatar’s legacy always forgot that first sight of Pandora’s forests. That film pushed the boundary of computer-generated worldbuilding, but its plot became as hacked up as an axe-throwing board. However, Cameron always knew his foundation was sturdy. No Smurf or Fern Gully jokes could give you back the breath you lost the first time you stepped foot in the most-realized movie world of the century this side of Middle Earth. Cameron always knew that the easiest ways to change the visual game was to root the story in most basic tropes. He was going to have all his fun playing God while familiarity filled in the gaps.

Avatar: The Way of Water finds Cameron challenging himself as a storyteller all while setting the new bar of visual storytelling. Once you dive into Pandora’s oceans, you can’t go back. Filmmakers across the world are going to be pulling their hair out as to how they’re going to make their big-budget studio films feel this natural. While some may nitpick the hyperrealism of high frame rate projection, Pandora’s beaches feel like destinations instead of computer-generated wizardry. You’re going to wonder when these shores will pop up on a leg of The Amazing Race. Kevin Feige is going to have to go into hiding with how good Avatar: The Way of Water looks. It makes the latest Avengers film look like it was released around the time of Young Sherlock Holmes.

Disney/20th Century Studios

On visual splendor alone, there really might not be a more believable impossibility than swimming among the sea creatures of the new Avatar film. If you find the right IMAX 3D screen, you might as well pack a bathing suit and scuba gear. Your theater is about to take water, and your skin is about to turn blue. Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver level the film’s worldbuilding with a refreshingly complicated story of families and trust. Right away, the Jake Sully clan (now complete with kids) is sent on the run when the humans head back to Pandora, this time for permanent residence. Sully’s old nemesis, the thought-dead, Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang, stellar in his first mo-cap performance) wants blood for blood, now rebooted in the body of the blue-skinned aliens he once reviled.

The Sully family’s running finds them taking refuge with the Metkayina clan, Na’vi creatures more adept to their waterfaring home. The film’s middle portion almost amounts to a hangout movie, replete with plenty of time to swim around Pandora’s ocean floor and meet all the alien fish, whale-like tulkuns and sentient coral reefs. The Sullys struggle to fully integrate with their costal cousins, which pulls their family unit tighter as their world gets irrevocably smaller.

Disney/20th Century Studios

The film veers into an effort to both protect the Sullys from Quaritch’s revenge tour and the tulkuns from human hunters who want to mine their brain goo for the folks back on a deteriorating Earth. You’d probably guess it all ends in a water battle for the ages, and you’d assume correct. It’s everything Cameron does well as a filmmaker combined with some narrative complexities that make moral grey as tantalizing as all of Pandora’s other colors.

In a year already chocked full of fantastic blockbusters, Avatar: The Way of Water dives in at the last moment and takes the sponge cake. Cameron’s breathtaking sequel will make even the most aquaphobic want to slap on some water wings and jump into Cameron’s big blue world. Years from now, you’re going to be telling your grandkids about the first time you went swimming in Pandora. It’ll probably be lame for them with wherever movies are in their time. For us, it’s a new wave.

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