Shazam! Fury Of The Gods (2023) - Movie Review

Yep. We’re doing this. I meant what I said at the end of the Smile review: I can’t keep holding onto my experience with Lights Out, and I can’t keep holding that directly against David F. Sandberg to the point of boycotting his films out of sheer pettiness. Life’s too short for that shit. So, along with recently and finally checking out the first Shazam (it’s an alright movie, but very uneven), here I am reviewing its sequel. And quite frankly, I think life’s too short to be dealing with this either.

Pearl (2023) - Movie Review

The prequel to one of my favourite films from last year in X, Pearl serves as the origin story for that film’s surprisingly sympathetic villain of the same name. After how much X wound up impressing me, both as a straight-forward genre experience and as a multi-faceted treatise on the nature of horror, pornography, and cinema in general, I went into this excited but not necessarily knowing what I was getting myself into. And truth be told, I wound up enjoying this even more than X… but not for the reasons I was expecting.

Cocaine Bear (2023) - Movie Review

Elizabeth Banks’ last two directorial efforts (Pitch Perfect 2 and the latest Charlie’s Angels) were… alright. They had their strong feminist moments, and I’m thankful that the days of Movie 43 are far behind her at this point, but they weren’t necessarily the most memorable within their respective franchises. So when news hit that her next feature would be… well, a creature feature that looked destined to be a meme from the title alone, I wasn’t expecting much from it. But to be honest, this is the first time Banks has genuinely impressed me as a filmmaker, and the film itself is a whole lot of fun.

65 (2023) - Movie Review

Dinosaurs aren’t interesting anymore. The sense of wonder that Steven Spielberg once instilled in audiences by using modern cinema technology to bring prehistoric predators back to life with 1993’s Jurassic Park has since lost its lustre. There’s something to be said about how much further CGI and practical effects have come since then (or, if we’re being honest, how much harder they’re being pushed for the bulk of mainstream blockbuster visuals), but there’s the impact of that film’s own sequels to consider as well. The cleverest thing to come out of the Jurassic World trilogy (and bear in mind that I’m a staunch defender of Fallen Kingdom) is its potentially-unintentional observation of how jaded modern audiences have become, to the point where what once was considered breathtaking is now just… there. It's the kind of statement that makes the presence of even one sequel, let alone all five, seem counterproductive.

Scream VI (2023) - Movie Review

While Scream 2022 wasn’t necessarily my favourite horror film from that year (Mad God) or even my favourite slasher (X), it was an absolute cracker of a release that showed that the franchise was in strong hands, and it’s even gained extra endearment from me as it also served as the introduction to 2022 as a year where horror films came back with a vengeance. And following the example of the Wes Craven’s original granddaddy of meta-slashers, we now have a sequel just a year later and the results are… well, that might take a bit to really get into.