Author: Rob Dean

By all accounts, 2019 continues the recent hot streak of being an awful year on personal, international, environmental and spiritual levels, with each day feeling paradoxically like an eternity and speeding past in a blip. Fortunately, people could find solace in darkened movie theaters or through various streaming services with an abundance of great films that seemingly covered every type of mood and audience. From small indie dramas and massive blockbuster spectacles to quirky studio comedies and outsider slices of horror, it seemed like every possible emotional experience and genre was well represented with exemplary titles. The below list was…

With “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” audiences come to a sort of ending – for now, at least – of the saga that began over 42 years ago with George Lucas’ original space opera. Much like “Avengers: Endgame,” “The Rise of Skywalker” isn’t an ending to all stories told within the universe or the brand itself, but it does act as a (temporary) bit of punctuation meant to bring these decades of storytelling to a satisfying conclusion. Though “The Force Awakens” found director/co-writer J.J. Abrams capturing a lot the spirit of the original films while creating interesting characters and…

“Cats” isn’t that weird. Worse yet, it isn’t as weird as it should be. There are certainly odd moments and a peculiar novelty in watching Jennifer Hudson as a cat person sing her lungs out or Sir Ian McKellen giving a distracted meow while looking like a reject from Dr. Moreau’s island, but that initial absurdity is never topped or expanded upon, and an hour into watching its tedious “story” play out, viewers will no longer be fazed by these sexualized fursonas. Director/co-writer Tom Hooper (who crafted the screenplay with Lee Hall, based on the infamous stage musical by Andrew…

All art is political. That’s a statement that rankles many who view politicization as an ever-encroaching threat that taints all things. But making art is an active choice full of decisions both conscious and unconscious. This is especially true in film where, as Jean-Luc Godard said, “every edit is a lie.” There are certainly happy accidents that occur while making a movie, but things like casting, editing, lighting and musical scores are all chosen in tandem to produce desired effects. And in storytelling terms, that is reflected in the societal norms that are questioned or upheld – the values that…

The whodunnit has never been a big staple of cinema, but there are many entries throughout the years that have followed a winning formula: a cast of colorful characters (usually played by movie stars) in a specific location are all implicated in a crime, and it falls on a peculiar yet talented detective to crack the case. “And Then There Were None,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Murder by Death” and “Clue” all fit this mold, but while that tradition carried over to television with Jessica Fletcher, Columbo and Monk solving cases on a weekly basis, the genre has been sorely missing…

The judicial system comes already designed for drama – it’s literally a place of conflict and speeches with two opposing sides expressing their ideologies. “Dark Waters,” the latest film from director Todd Haynes, is a legal drama about the rigged systems in place that inevitably protect the powerful while harming the everyday person. While it’s a compelling and moving story that contains some very strong performances, the movie continually shifts between being a drama, a real-life exposé and a legal thriller, which ends up creating a muddled feel that never coheres. Every strong element is undercut by an odd decision…

“The Godfather Part III” is pretty fairly assessed by history and cinephiles at this point. While there is exaggeration about how bad it is, most of its flaws are pretty evident and its existence in the shadow of the two films before it only heighten where it went astray. But its ending, with elderly Michael Corleone falling over dead, forgotten and alone in some collapsing Italian villa, remains a fairly poignant punctuation mark on the mafia saga. If that moment was stretched out and combined with “Goodfellas” for three and a half hours, then that would be indicative of what…

There are few things as aggravating to witness as squandered potential, and that’s “Charlie’s Angels” in a nutshell – a film that constantly cracks open the door on exciting possibilities only to reveal that it’s barely even acceptable storytelling. Writer/director Elizabeth Banks finds every possibility to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with a lifeless script, diluted performances and inept action, all captured with bafflingly poor cinematography and editing. Every so often, the film gives the impression that it’s about to take a turn for the better only for another deflated scene to arrive and reconfirm its brazen less-than-mediocrity. Sabina…

There have been hundreds of films made about World War II and the Holocaust that have covered the atrocity from multiple angles and across genres and decades of filmmaking. It was a major event that reshaped the world, not to mention the over six million lives extinguished at the hands of the Nazis. With that vast number of people affected, there will always be a preponderance of stories, not just to honor those souls but also as a way of not allowing people to forget or look away. “Jojo Rabbit,” written and directed by Taika Waititi (from a novel by…

There don’t appear to be any hard or fast rules about the appropriate length of time between installments in a movie franchise. You’d think that long intervals would lead to a feeling of staleness or a weird disconnect, but sometimes it works; “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” “Blade Runner 2049” and “The Strangers: Prey at Night” all had varying levels of success and kept the spirit alive more than a decade after the original film. There have been others that felt like they missed their window (“Jurassic World,” “Super Troopers 2”), while retaining the same creative team doesn’t always ensure…