In Theaters Archives - FilmFisher

Dune (PG-13)

For many years, my only impression of Dune was that it was to Star Wars as Game of Thrones is to Lord of the Rings: the “adult version,” which is to say, the version that mistakes darkness for sophistication, cynicism for maturity, explicit sex and violence for being “grown up.” Last year, reading Frank Herbert’s […]
Last Night in Soho (R)

Nostalgia is a bitter pill to swallow. Far too often, whenever we paint a portrait of the past, it’s very much an idealized vision: only the glitz and the glamour and never the harsh realities. Edgar Wright’s latest film, Last Night in Soho – and, indeed, his whole filmography – feels like the director is trying to […]
No Time to Die (PG-13)

Leading up to the release of the twenty-fifth James Bond film, No Time to Die, Travis Kyker and Timothy Lawrence collaborated on a retrospective of Daniel Craig’s first four outings as Bond. You can read that conversation here. What follows is their discussion of the new movie, which brings Craig’s run as Bond to a […]
Malignant (R)

Most genre filmmakers would kill to have a career trajectory like James Wan’s. Not only did his feature debut Saw put him on the map, but it also proved his touch had a ripple effect, the ability to influence trends within the genre. By the time the Conjuring franchise rolled around and was a critical […]
The Green Knight (R)

Although the film is officially titled The Green Knight, the first title card we see reads, “Sir Gawain and…” At first glance, this seems to reinforce the centrality of the hero (Dev Patel), aspiring Knight of the Round Table and nephew to King Arthur (Sean Harris). Each of the subsequent title cards announcing his episodic adventures […]
Old (PG-13)

We don’t appreciate M. Night Shyamalan enough. Sure, his career has had its fair share of bruises, and it sometimes feels like those misfires have overshadowed his best films. That he’s refused to hang up his hat and has now navigated himself into something of a small comeback with his recent crop of self-funded, small-budgeted […]
Black Widow (PG-13)

First things first: It was great to be inside a movie theater again. (That business of seeing Tenet in October and having the feeling Christopher Nolan would be the death of me doesn’t, doesn’t count.) If nothing else, I can always look back fondly on Black Widow as the occasion for my celebratory return to […]
Luca (PG)

“You are probably too young to remember this,” I once told my high school students, “But Pixar used to make good movies.” Like many of the things I say to get a rise out of the youngsters, the statement had an element of hyperbole to it…
Godzilla vs. Kong (PG-13)

Say what you will about Marvel movies: when Captain America and Iron Man came to blows in Captain America: Civil War, at least the filmmakers played it as a tragedy, not a gladiator match. The use of “v.” instead of “vs.” in the title Batman v. Superman made it sound more like a Supreme Court […]
The New Mutants (PG-13)

It may be three years late, but The New Mutants is finally here. Getting to watch what is now officially the final X-Men film made under 20th Century Fox’s banner was nothing short of surreal because, at one point, I really thought it might never be released.* Last summer, I wrote about how Disney absorbing 20th Century […]
Tenet (PG-13)

One suspects that Christopher Nolan became a filmmaker because film is a uniquely time-based art form. In Inception, minutes of waking life translate to hours of dream time; in Interstellar, an astronaut boards a spaceship shaped like a clock and travels into a black hole that stretches hours into years. Nolan is fascinated by time, […]
The Invisible Man (R)

In the early days of cinema, just after the introduction of sound, many of the cinematic genres we’re familiar with today were crystallized by particular studios who focused their efforts on certain niches. Universal Pictures had the horror market cornered with their adaptations of late 19th century literature, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and HG […]
JoJo Rabbit (PG-13)

Parodying Hitler is nothing new. Charlie Chaplin played him in The Great Dictator (1940), long before Look Who’s Back (2015), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Mein Führer: The Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (2007), and the countless memes that subtitled Hitler’s bunker tirade in Downfall (2004). Before the U.S. had entered WWII, mocking Hitler for two […]
1917 (R)

When I was about 13, my father rented (from an establishment called Blockbuster) an odd little film called Rope. He is an Alfred Hitchcock aficionado and had discovered that this was one of Hitch’s lesser known films, which he had yet to see. In the days before IMDb and easy internet access, information like this was […]
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (PG-13)

An early scene in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a fitting metaphor for the film as a whole. Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac), fleeing TIE Fighters in the Millennium Falcon, escape their pursuers by “lightspeed skipping” – a dangerous maneuver (or so we’re told, though it goes smoothly enough for our […]
Black Christmas (2019) (PG-13)

Further proof that studios think that any intellectual property is better than having no intellectual property, Black Christmas, the second remake of the original film, actually doesn’t benefit from its namesake since it bears very little of that infamous, incredible proto-slasher from 1974. The idea to update what was an incredibly socially relevant and quite subversive […]
The Irishman (R)

Roger Ebert once said that “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” In other words: length is not indicative of quality, but together, the two get along just fine. Few names are as ubiquitous with lengthy runtimes as Martin Scorsese, who, since the 1970s, has been making films that […]
Frozen II (PG)

Firstly, let it be known that our fearless editor had to reach out to see if anybody was willing to see Frozen II over its opening weekend. I chose to fall on the sword. Not because I was hopeful that Walt Disney Animation’s latest would be worthwhile – no, I knew going in that I was […]
Ford v Ferrari (PG-13)

Let’s get this one thing straight: there’s nothing magical about 7000 rpm. I own an Infiniti G37 that redlines at 7500 rpm and I’ve been over 7000 rpm a couple of times. Nothing special happened. In fact, it’s usually when I’m trying to get on the freeway and the automatic gearbox shifted down a gear […]
Dr. Sleep (R)

In Dr. Sleep director Mike Flanagan manages to weave together disparate threads skillfully, delivering a film about hauntings and reconciliation that is both faithful to its origins and strong enough to stand on its own.