MOVIE REVIEW: Challengers

Challengers roars forth to use the invasive scrutiny found in tennis as a mimicking reflection of personal hostilities and exposed intimacies. Keeping with that idea of body language, Guadagnino’s blistering athletic love triangle is a ballet of sweat and a battle of three beautifully furrowed brows set atop the lithe bodies of Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist. For two hours-plus mirroring the length of a full set tennis match, this film cuts years deep and rips off scabs to show you why those brows are furrowed and towards whom.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Greatest Hits

Merging this kind of existential melodrama with the outlandish happenstance of time travel requires characters audiences will care about beyond pragmatics and a lush production that can sprinkle magic on the grains of salt required. With the three charismatic and emerging talents present, the human appeal is covered in The Greatest Hits.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Iron Claw

Let’s just say it now upfront. Folks are going to walk up completely unprepared for The Iron Claw. They’re going to see the old school wrestling setting and the ripped bod of Zac Efron and swoon a little. They’re going to want, as one WWE superstar of this era so hilariously expressed once, “big meaty men slappin’ meat.” That’s cute, but The Iron Claw is not No Holds Barred or Nacho Libre.

MOVIE REVIEW: Maestro

To say Bradley Cooper threw himself into his work is an understatement. He is a marvel to behold. The actor was operating with a spot-on imitation of Bernstein’s vocal annunciations, inflections, cadence, and tone. He found all the highs and lows of hubris, profundity, stress, dedication, and talent in front of and behind the camera. Is all of this in Maestro ostentatious hopscotch from Cooper? Probably, but what else would you expect from an energy like working at an insanely masterful level?

2023, 5 STARS, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanNovember 23, 2023Maestro, Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, NetflixComment

MOVIE REVIEW: Wish

Taken for what its title represents, Wish maintains what has become the comprehensive theme and guiding principle throughout the history of the Walt Disney Company. Proudly continuing a century now after its founding, each new creative effort proves the Disney well of artistic storytelling striving for wish fulfillment remains bouyant and bottomless. Wish is a sparkling and meaningful new entry that genuflects to its history and stamps a little piece of its own.

2023, 3 STARS, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, Animated Film, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanNovember 18, 2023Wish, Ariana DeBose, Chris PineComment

MOVIE REVIEW: Trolls Band Together

Just like the first film that crescendo-ed with the Oscar-nominated “Can’t Stop The Feeling,” the high point of Trolls Band Together arrives with its signature song “Better Place.” It’s sung first by the combined cast during the plot while *NSYNC takes over for the full version over the closing credits. It’s an earworm of a pop ditty and siren’s song for the moms and dads. If “Better Place” were any catchier, it would be made of Velcro, require a multi-stage emergency vaccine, and required to be gloved by MLB All-Star J.T. Realmuto.

MOVIE REVIEW: Killers of the Flower Moon

For better or worse, that’s a microcosm of the entirety of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. As helpful as Robertson’s plucked metronome is to fill voids and create a foreboding cinematic heartbeat, your own pulse rate ends up matching that placidness. No matter what heinous deception, jarring murder, or well-appointed finery appears on screen, very little in the film intensifies or accelerates beyond that methodical drowning dirge.

MOVIE REVIEW: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

After nearly 30 years, we are locked in and present for all that these dire missions entail– consequences and all, hope and all. We’ve made our choice and signed our own oath of fandom to chase our own tails and hang on every clue. Give us one more adventure, Tom. We’re as ready and committed as you are.

MOVIE REVIEW: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

For the second film in 34 years, a new Indiana Jones film cheapens the perfect ending they already had. Make no mistake, the sunset ride of Indiana Jones the the Last Crusade was a “come back with your shield or on it” moment that cannot be topped. Yet, here we are, watching a studio milk an intellectual property they purchased after its peak for one more box office windfall. The producers are calling Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a “one last time” type of excursion. It is indeed that. It is one last time to wish they left it alone or had a better story worth telling.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Flash

This movie was better off not slamming the accelerator through its narrative entanglements to the next action showdown. Miller and company are best in The Flash when they are not doing something super and addressing the bigger themes about their conditions and consequences. You feel the movie’s melodrama hit most not when it zips by you with a rush of hot air but in stillness when it wrestles with its proverbial speed demons.

MOVIE REVIEW: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Wiping away all the dropped cameos, the central high-spirited affection in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is incredibly powerful. Emotions run as high as the web slingers swing with an extremely thick and, yes, impossibly convoluted saga of how all of these zany Multiverse threads either come together or exist in their separate planes with every possible brick of towering importance.

2023, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanJune 1, 2023Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-VerseComment

MOVIE REVIEW: The Little Mermaid

Putting my school teacher hat on to match the spirit of this website, The Little Mermaid, like every movie really, is, for better or worse, a series of tests. It has become nearly impossible during this current cycle of Disney “re-imaginings” not to have questions of comparison arise between the original animated classics and their newfangled remakes. Depending on a person’s fandom or scruples (or both), that list can be long, short, casual, or petty.

EVERY MOVIE HAS A LESSON

by Don Shanahan

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