Author: Rob Dean

A fairly recent trend of films receiving sequels decades after the last installment has yielded mixed results. In some cases, revisiting these worlds and characters reveals new layers in interesting ways. Other times, it’s mostly just doubling down on the familiar with a series of callback gags that feels like it retroactively tarnishes the original. “Coming 2 America,” which arrives 33 years after the last movie, is rarely hindered by nostalgia for its predecessor; in fact, a lot of the throwbacks end up being surprisingly strong. But in trying to expand the world, the film ends up feeling overcrowded with no real…

At some point in our lives, rules start to matter in storytelling. They are, after all, the framework on which a successful narrative is built. This is the issue with Doug Liman’s “Chaos Walking.” Despite being based on a trilogy of books (and a screenplay co-written by its author, Patrick Ness), the rules in the film are remarkably inconsistent, which distracts from its own tale. While it boasts strong performances, some cool visuals and multiple engaging sequences, a lot of “Chaos Walking” feels like it’s missing key pieces needed to make it a more enjoyable movie. The story takes place…

There is a moment in 2018’s “Widows” in which Daniel Kaluuya, playing a lieutenant in a criminal enterprise, confronts one of his underlings who has messed up. The sequence bristles with intensity as the actor barely says a word, instead staring down his subordinate in the menacing yet curious way that a predator regards its captive prey. Kaluuya is an astounding talent capable of communicating a wide range of emotions and character, and he delivers yet another strong performance as Fred Hampton, former chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and the subject of Shaka King’s “Judas…

“Out of sight, out of mind” is an accurate and damning assessment of society in general. If people aren’t confronted with visual confirmation of events, then they don’t believe how serious a situation is — or that even it happened. This plausible deniability repeats many times in history, with one recent example being the detainees held extralegally in Guantánamo Bay. Hundreds of people have been imprisoned and, in most cases, tortured in that facility, causing a horrific humanitarian crisis that most people simply forget about. It’s a political landmine, a moral quagmire and a true stain on the country’s conscience,…

Great art tends to be a marriage of intelligence and emotion, but there is still something to be said for those works that are expertly crafted but not genuinely affecting. For example, James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is a brilliantly written book with clever symbolism and a meticulous construction of events that is admirable but not especially stirring for readers. “The Little Things,” from writer/director John Lee Hancock, similarly aims for a clever approach and deconstruction of tropes without truly achieving any real poignancy, further weakened by the fact that the intellectual insight is…

“The X-Files” aired about the same time as the internet’s social aspects were blossoming. This led to it being one of the first shows to have its own active presence on the web, with fans praising the supernatural drama, going down rabbit holes about the “real-life” inspirations and conjecturing about the overarching mythos. “Lost” used J.J. Abrams’ famous mystery box motif to weave in references, subtle nods and more to build up mysteries that birthed a million online communities with theories about what would happen next and what it all meant. There have been other shows that spawned this kind…

Every year-end film roundup will likely comment on how odd 2020 was for movies. The pandemic forced a lot of changes in the world of cinema, with drastically reduced film festivals, shifting dates, closed movie theaters and more. But how do titles fare when there’s a smaller pool from which to judge? Did watching them on VOD or away from others affect how certain movies played for audiences? Did any of these films benefit from being told while 2020’s pressing stories and issues were occurring? And will they be less resonant as time moves on or will they improve as…

There’s an apocryphal story about the making of “Jaws” that claims that when people noted that killing the shark with a compressed air tank wasn’t realistic, Steven Spielberg responded that if he hasn’t kept the audience’s attention for the previous two hours, they were already checked out. Plot contrivances and sloppy mistakes are forgivable if the rest of the film works well and is engaging on an emotional level. Conversely, if there isn’t that connection, then each shortcoming will become more pronounced and detrimental to the experience. This is certainly true of “Wonder Woman 1984.” Though it has some scenes…

There’s a very fine line between finding common ground and overlooking important differences. This demarcation usually arises in discussions about equality versus equity. There are many shared traits and experiences between people, but while one of the threads connecting all of us is pain, a quick summation brushes past the severity of certain traumas to push towards an imbalanced unity. Directed by Paul Greengrass, who also co-wrote the script with Luke Davies, “News of the World” takes place right after the American Civil War and finds a scarred man traveling across a broken nation with a wounded child — seeking…

The back half of Season Two of “The Mandalorian” was eventful, with some strong moments, but it also suggests that the seams are already beginning to show. For a season and a half, there hasn’t been a ton of crossover between the Disney+ series and the nine central “Star Wars” films apart from the occasional mention of familiar characters and events, as well as visits to previously known locations, but that all changed with Chapter 13. There were already allusions to Boba Fett and others that helped paved the way for this expansion in the show, but with the recent…