MCU returns to form – an unwatchable CGI nightmare

Posted on March 1, 2025 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

In Captain America: New World – woah, WOAH! This movie is titled what now? OK. OK, that’s better.

In Captain America: New World Order Brave New World, after the COVID-19 crisis and the 2023 double-strike combined to form a long production pause, the MCU finally returns to the form we saw during the early COVID years – an incredibly overexpensive TV show that charges movie ticket prices per-episode that is deeply inbred, at once desperate for new fans and completely impossible for a new viewer to approach, ugly as sin, a years-long catastrophe of writing and a completely unwatchable disaster of editing.

March, post-election- President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford), last seen officially dismantling the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War as Secretary of State, approaches the end of his first 100 days in office on the edge of brokering a deal to share adamantium, the new near-magical metal that’s been discovered on Celestial Island – you know what? World peace! He’s basically about to broker world peace. He remains anxious and insecure, however, because his daughter still won’t talk to him after he tried to kill her boyfriend, the Hulk, 16 years ago in The Incredible Hulk. On the brink of this historic deal, Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), the genius behind his political maneuvering with the apparent power to control minds whom Ross has kept imprisoned in a blacksite since that time, plots to take his revenge by scuttling the deal and spoiling Ross’ place in history.

Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Captain America née Falcon, isn’t really involved with that conflict, he just tries to stop Sterns’ minions whenever he’s in the same room.

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‘Longlegs’ shakes the horror genre, will turn your stomach and bust you gut in one night out

Posted on July 22, 2024 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Neon.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Writer/director Oz Perkins’ new masterpiece Longlegs is going to change horror forever. It’s an absolute knockout, eerie, haunting and disquieting while also just joyful enough to put several grins on your face.

Oregon, 1990s- FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), after demonstrating what appear to be clairvoyant powers, is assigned to the case of a horrifying serial killer who murders entire families at a time while appearing to have never even entered their homes. The only evidence of his existence are the encrypted, hand-written notes he leaves at the scenes, signed “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage, who also produces).

Longlegs is a horror masterpiece for several reasons, but the best is the most surface-level – this movie is trying really, really hard to scare and entertain you. As disturbing as the subject matter is and as challenging as the film ends up being, you’re also in for a real show. Cinematographer Andrés Arochi’s every shot is breathtaking, usually in a distinctly scary way but sometimes it’s just generically well-shot, and what moments there are of levity are palpably joyful. You can feel when the film is having fun with you.

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Living with the phantom of ‘The Phantom Menace’

Posted on June 8, 2024 by reelentropy
Images courtesy 20th Century Fox.

Somehow, it is 2024, meaning we are almost a quarter-century into this new millennium. 1999, the final year that looks like it belongs in the past to my eyes, is 25 years ago. The upshot is the year was chalk-full of instant classics like The Matrix and Fight Club that are all enjoying 25th anniversary re-releases.

Many theaters commit one Sunday afternoon screen per week to classics or anniversary screenings, and it’s usually a magical experience, but a quiet one, a theater half-full of just the people who already know whatever film by heart. But on Saturday May 4, the informally recognized annual Star Wars Day because of the pun, of this 2024, many theaters cleared their larger houses for an anniversary film that couldn’t quite be described as an instant classic – that’s correct, the grandfather of all long-awaited sequels, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, is 25 years old now.

A quarter century later, I think I’ve found what viewers and critics in 1999 didn’t understand. There’s an invisible genre shift from Star Wars to The Phantom Menace, and the prequel makes a lot more sense if you look directly at it. Star Wars viewers are accustomed to disguised westerns, but this new film was hard sci-fi, with all its its off-kilter space characters and politics. The weirdness was the point.

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I don’t run screaming out of theaters often, but ‘The Zone of Interest’ got me there

Posted on April 24, 2024 by reelentropy
Images courtesy A24.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

The Zone of Interest is a soul-shaking historical document, closer to a docudrama or recreation than a traditional film.  

Auschwitz concentration camp in Oświęcim, Nazi-occupied Poland, summer, 1943- Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife, Hedwig (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller), live a quiet, idyllic life in their residence bordering the northwest wall of the infamous Nazi killing center. Every day, Rudolf Höss goes to work, where he experiments with gasses and approves funding for new crematoriums to make sure the largest mass murder in human history continues smoothly, and Hedwig Höss keeps their five children and the servants while tending the enormous garden that borders the prison wall. On weekends, they play in the Soła and host parties with other Nazis.

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Simulacra, simulation, ‘Mean Girls’

Posted on April 22, 2024 by reelentropy
This is supposed to be in a high school? Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

Mean Girls (Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr, 2024) is an adaptation of a Broadway musical that was itself an adaptation of the iconic 2004 film Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004), and it’s exactly what it looks like.

North Shore High School in Evanston, Illinois, apparently pre-pandemic, probably in 2017 when the play premiered, who cares- high school junior Cady Heron (Angourie Rice), after 12 years of homeschooling with her zoologist parents in Kenya, is thrust into a different kind of wilderness when – I may as well summarize “Hamlet.” You know how the story goes.

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