Last Rites falls into the fatal trap of reminding me of several better movies. It references Ghostbusters and Poltergeist repeatedly to tie in its 1986 setting, and I can’t watch a haunted mirror movie without going back to Mike Flanagan’s debut masterpiece Occulus. It also shares a huge needle drop with the opening credits for British crime thriller Layer Cake, which is unfortunate.
⭐
Rating: 1 out of 5.
For 15 years, the Insidious/Conjuring series have been my bane, these stupid, colorless Halloween costume movies that rake in money hand over fist on name recognition and nothing else. Lately, however, New Line Cinema has affixed The Conjuring series with a franchise director, and the quality of their visual compositions, if nothing else, have sharply increased, and they’re putting these in IMAXs now after Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon did so well a couple years back. Would this hold for director Michael Chaves’ fourth and “final” entry, The Conjuring: Last Rites?
A member of the legendary class of ’99, I saw The Matrix twice in theaters last year for 25th anniversary screenings. This was after a 2021 re-release ahead of The Matrix Resurrections, the series’ corporate-mandated retrofit, which was actually my first opportunity to see it in a theater.
Seeing The Matrix at the giant IMAX on Webb Chapel was very much like seeing it for the first time. The soundscape, a weak point in home viewing, is rich and layered in a theater’s surround sound, bringing out details I’d never heard before almost immediately, but what I really notice is the lighting. Famously, inside the Matrix, everything has a sickly green tint, but it’s also just slightly blown out. In photography, “exposure” refers to the amount of light that a piece of film is exposed to – “overexposed” means too much light hit the sensor, “underexposed” means too little, and “blown out” specifically means so much light hit the film that details in the brightest parts of the image aren’t recoverable. Scenes set in the Matrix are deliberately and very slightly blown out, the whites just barely stretching into those characteristic burnmarks that stand out if you know what you’re looking for. It’s obviously an artistic choice, but it registers in your brain as a mistake, this constant reminder that something about the world onscreen is phony.
What’s happened here is the guy from “The Whitest Dudes U’ Know” took a rip, the kind of mid-range rip you think is huge when you’re taking it but doesn’t impress anyone else in the room, and said “What if ‘Naruto’ running were scary?” Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
There’s a new mystery box dealer in Hollywood. His boxes are also empty.
The mystery box is always empty.
Maybrook, Pennsylvania, 2:17 a.m. on a Wednesday- Seventeen children from the same class at Maybrook Elementary, as one, get out of bed and run out into the night. Police interview their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), and their only remaining classmate, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), but get nowhere and apparently do nothing else. The story picks up a month later after the school has reopened and follows a handful characters who continue to unravel the mystery, primarily Gandy and one of the missing children’s fathers, Archer Graff (Josh Brolin, who also produces executively).
CBS, weeks after parent company Paramount agreed to donate $16 million to the Trump presidential library to settle a nonsensical lawsuit it would easily have beaten had it fought, announced this week it would not renew the contract of leading late-night host Stephen Colbert and that “The Late Show,” which has aired since 1993 and Colbert has hosted since 2015, would be cancelled.
“The Late Show” was the highest-rated late-night show in the nation at the time of this announcement. Colbert, a frequent critic of President Donald Trump, had also criticized his parent company for its capitulation. CBS lied and called it a purely financial decision. Multiple U.S. senators and the Writer’s Guild of America, on behalf of “The Late Show’s” staff writers, have all called for an investigation.
Trump had already extracted a similar commitment from Disney over a similarly laughable lawsuit, and the same week this was happening, began the process anew with a shocking public threat to sue The Wall Street Journal and parent company Dow Jones, which he followed through on the next day.
I set out to write about why there’s more nuance to this situation, and there is, but that nuance doesn’t change the calculation. This is exactly what it looks like, and exactly what Colbert said it was days before being told his contract wouldn’t be renewed: a big fat bribe.
Superman, circa 2025, shielding a small child from harm. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
After 12 excruciating years, Warner Bros. has given up the ghost and paved over the muddy, miserable Man of Steel with a sunny, cheerful new Superman movie, with James Gunn as writer, director and producer and affixed as the chief of a new cinematic DC Universe. This time, there’ll be no debilitating fear of God, no neck snapping and no director’s cuts.
I want to love Superman, but it’s just OK. What it really fails to do is escape the terrible legacy it inherits. After years of the DCEU desperately responding to criticism in each new entry, the DCU enters the world with the same personnel responding to the same criticism in a lot of the same ways the previous series had settled on by the end.
Reel Entropy 