They Cloned Tyrone (2023) - Movie Review

After co-writing Creed II, and getting thrown into the unholy soup that is the script for Space Jam: A New Legacy, writer Juel Taylor has made his directorial debut with one of the better Blaxploitation flips I’ve seen in a minute. Where remakes of the old guard like Shaft and Superfly felt the need to modernise the genre’s aesthetics (which only brought into question why they’d even bother getting involved in that genre in the first place), this actually sticks to its identifiable qualities, albeit with some updating on the cultural references like Obama and Bitcoin. The moody, shadowy cinematography from DP Ken Seng, the Terrace Martin-esque funk soundtrack from Desmond Murray and Pierre Charles (those basslines are just *chef’s kiss*), the frankly amazing costume design across the board; this looks really damn good.

Strays (2023) - Movie Review

Hoo boy. It’s been a while since we’ve dealt with some talking animal shit on here, eh? That sub-genre that I keep running into and keep being aghast at just how bad it can get. And on top of that, we’re not dealing with an animated film; instead, we’ve got 2000s-era CGI work meant to make real-life dogs look like they’re talking, as if the non-existence movement above the nose-line doesn’t break the illusion every single time. Yeah, suffice to say, I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy at the prospect of watching this, but to its credit, it does have some merit to it. Just not in any of the obvious places.

Day Shift (2022) - Movie Review

Well, we’ve taken a look at David Leitch’s efforts this year, between directing Bullet Train and producing Violent Night; let's see what the other half of 87Eleven has been up to. And it seems that Chad Stahelski’s giving another stuntman his turn in the director’s chair, bringing J. J. Perry out of a several-year hiatus to helm this action-comedy about vampire hunting in sunny California. And I gotta be honest, I think I like this more than Violent Night.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - Movie Review

I know this is far from the first time Marvel Studios has done me, but fuck me, the marketing for this film has been extremely annoying. No joke, I saw two ads that were promotional tie-ins to this movie in the pre-session of the actual movie. Because buying a ticket for it apparently wasn’t enough; they had to keep trying to sell it to me. There’s also how flat-out ridiculous the session times for this movie have been, where it assimilated between 75% and 95% of all available screenings at both of my local cinemas, with one, maybe two sessions that were taken up by the eleven other films that are supposedly showing now as well. Anyone trying to use this film’s success as a gotcha for the 'wokeness' of other MCU films, or the MCU in competition with the DCEU, or even as a sign that the industry is picking back up since COVID first broke, are leaving out that the odds were stacked substantially in the production’s favour to get those box office receipts.

To be honest, I deliberately put off watching this movie for its first week because, as much as I love superhero movies, I really didn’t want to reward this overbearing, “Scorsese might have been underselling the problem” kind of behaviour.

Anyway, now that I’ve got my initial gripes out of the way, let’s get into how fucking brilliant this movie is.

Project Power (2020) - Movie Review

Looks like my superhero jones is sticking around, so let’s look a film that takes that idea rather literally: Superpowers as drugs. It’s something tied into the darker aspects of a world with superpowers, where the option of taking a pill to get your own power set becomes a dilemma of whether you’d survive the trip and, more pointedly, what kind of person you’d become in the aftermath. ‘Power corrupts’ as the saying goes, and with this Nawlins-set sci-fi thriller about a new drug that gives the user a superpower for five minutes, quite a few questions get brought up. Not a lot of them get answered, though.