Patrick Dunn

Somewhere during the titular bout in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, I hated myself for liking superhero movies. This feeling is almost certain to be temporary, dissipating when Captain America: Civil War rolls around in May. But there’s something singularly bleak about what will heretofore be abbreviated as BvS – something distinct from the post-9/11 political provocations of Christopher Nola...[Read More]

The Coen brothers first started publicly discussing their idea for Hail, Caesar! over a decade ago, but the resulting film feels jauntily tossed together in a fraction of that time. In some ways that’s a good thing. The film has a loose comic energy that allows it to slip easily from lengthy sketches to plottier sequences. But it’s also lacking in coherence. The Coens seem unsure if they’re making...[Read More]

One of the great strengths of the Rocky franchise is its sense of a true continuing narrative, rather than a momentum-devoid series of rehashes orchestrated purely for financial gain. From the original Rocky through Rocky III, and again with 2006’s Rocky Balboa, the series’ characters actually change in interesting, logical, and significant ways from film to film. We’ll neglect the more perfunctor...[Read More]

Sure, the story of Crimson Peak is familiar, but the way it’s presented and the places it goes are wholly original. The film is a gothic horror story, set in an imposing 19th-century British mansion plagued by ghosts. We’ve all seen these elements done and done again, but never with the black humor, emotional depth, and ravishing visual beauty that writer-director Guillermo del Toro brings to the ...[Read More]

The Tom Hanks-starring period piece Bridge of Spies is Steven Spielberg’s best and most entertaining film since…well, his last Tom Hanks-starring period piece. In the decade-plus since the delightful Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg’s made good starchy period pieces (Lincoln), dull starchy period pieces (War Horse) and a few old-school adventure pictures that still can’t shake a certain sedateness (...[Read More]

Black Mass is not necessarily a bad mob film, but it’s a mob film too concerned with emulating the cool of other, better mob films to develop any real voice of its own. Director Scott Cooper clearly had Martin Scorsese on the brain as he put this film together, but Cooper brings none of his own creative intent to the table. David O. Russell recently aped Scorsese with even wilder abandon in Americ...[Read More]

Over the course of his career, M. Night Shyamalan has shown a deft hand with horror and suspense, a major tone-deafness with interpersonal drama, and a slippery grasp on anything approaching humor. These attributes come out to varying degrees depending on which Shyamalan joint you’re watching, but never has the writer/director thrown himself at a little bit of everything with the perplexing abando...[Read More]

When was the last time you saw a cinematic sex scene that felt anything like real life? Movies can’t seem to help turning sex into a glossy fantasy, or else a joke – among recent releases, you can give Trainwreck some credit for realism in depicting intercourse, but never without a laugh to follow. So it’s particularly refreshing, to some degree even shocking, to see sex depicted with the kind of ...[Read More]

It’s nearly impossible to say anything about what makes The Gift so good without revealing its two crucial, spine-tinglingly effective plot twists. The best any critic can really do in reviewing the flick is to say: The Gift is very, very good. Just stop reading and go see it now. But since I’m obligated to shake down something more than fifty words about the film, here are a few things that can b...[Read More]

Don’t let all the bad reviews and months of overwhelmingly negative buzz about Fantastic Four fool you: there are absolutely some praiseworthy elements to the film. There’s just not close to enough of any of them. Even setting aside the common fanboy complaint that this new take on the comic-book team is unnecessarily “dark and gritty,” there are undoubtedly flashes of a perfectly decent movie her...[Read More]

If you’ve seen any of the marketing for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, you’ve almost certainly seen the image of Tom Cruise gripping the side of a jet plane as it takes off. The outrageous stunt is real, and the laws of modern movie marketing would seem to dictate that this could well be the money shot for the whole movie. So there’s a certain refreshing pleasure in sitting down to watch the ...[Read More]

Judd Apatow is the maestro of the dick joke, the current reigning king of gross-out humor, and the guy who brought you all those hey-bro-let’s-get-drunk-and-get-laid movies. But Apatow’s secret weapon, and the likely reason for his broad appeal, is that he’s admittedly a family-values guy at heart. From The 40-Year-Old Virgin to This Is 40, the binge drinking and drug use and sexcapades in Apatow ...[Read More]