REVIEW: 'Deadpool 2' expands the vigilante family

They say that Reynolds was born to play Deadpool and probably because so much of the character has been informed by his own career. He got his first breaks in the ‘90s when gross-out teenage comedies were big summer films, and for a long time he was known as that guy from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder before becoming the lovable idiot or the action star who couldn’t stop making stupid but funny jokes in Blade: Trinity. Superhero films have become both a source of fun and occasional misery, but perhaps no other actor has as much right to lampoon them than the guy who’s been in two of the worst ones in history.

REVIEW: 'Solo: A Star Wars Story' smuggles some good moments from a troubled shoot

It’s mildly diverting stuff, though unfortunately it doesn’t have the same verve or sparkle as a true heist film, or even of something else from Disney’s catalogue, Guardians of the Galaxy. The whole thing is very capably assembled, but there’s a nagging, familiar feeling of a movie that changed hands partway through production. Which, of course, is exactly what happened.

REVIEW: 'Batman Ninja' cannot be unseen

Let’s start with the good; Batman Ninja looks gorgeous. The smoother CGI and cel animation threw me for a loop because I’m still used to some of the herky-jerky action of the old hand-drawn ones, but the colours are vivid, the movements look cool and smooth and the transitions are creative. I watched it with its original Japanese audio and I had no qualms with the voice acting or the translated subtitles, but note there is a completely different set of subtitles to go with the English audio.

Film, New ReleasesJason ChenMay 23, 2018batman, ninja, batman ninja, japan, feudal, anime, afro samurai, samurai, warner bros, animation, takashi okazaki, movie, video, review, cinema, filmComment

REVIEW: 'You Were Never Really Here' commands you to stay

The problem with a lot of crime films is that they often feel the need to explain multiple backstories to their viewers before going for the pay-off moment, rather than dropping them in to the middle of a crisis and saying, “here, figure it out.” There’s no big build-up here; you see things as Joe sees it, and a lot of it doesn’t make sense right away. Joe’s PTSD is as much a character of its own as Joe, and it’s often manifested through quick cuts to Joe suffocating himself with plastic bags or silently drowning in water

SEASON REVIEW: ‘Lost in Space’ launches a progressive, but uneven reboot

And just as venerable franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars adapt to the changing times, Lost in Space has launched on Netflix in a shiny new production, looking to mirror the progressive ideals of the current cultural landscape. And even though some may argue that sci-fi is a saturated genre, Lost in Space – whose original version actually predates the original Trek by a year, hitting CBS in 1965 – does try to set itself apart. It keeps the focus not on the intrepid crew of Starfleet-esque officers, or on a rag-tag group of rebels taking down an evil empire, but on a family unit.

REVIEW: 'Avengers: Infinity War' puts death on pause, but not without spectacle

This is why it doesn’t make any sense to fixate on who lives and dies in Avengers: Infinity War (this review certainly won’t). The odds on who survives the titular battle have been argued over for years online, with armchair critics trying to guess the exit points of series regulars like Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) or Captain America (Chris Evans) based on vaguely defined employment contracts that every fan seems to know about without having actually read.

REVIEW: 'Pacific Rim Uprising' and how it stagnates a franchise

The story is pretty predictable after that: the drone Jaegers fail big time and the kaiju return with the biggest kaiju ever and Jake and Nate have to learn how to put aside their differences and save the world as a team. It’s a near rip-off of the plot of the first film, where two characters who start off disliking each other end up being perfect for each other, and in fact, if Pacific Rim: Uprising was a romcom it could actually work.

REVIEW: ‘Isle of Dogs’ trades Wes Anderson’s coziness for scrappiness

It’s the relationship between Atari, Chief and Spots that really fuels the film. Anderson and his team punctuate the movie with intense close-ups of both the dogs and Atari, deep in thought, tears coming to their eyes as they think about the beings they care about.

REVIEW: 'Ready Player One' beats the game by scrubbing away the grime

So what was Spielberg and his team to do? Arguably, there are two routes: engage with Wade’s freaky behaviour and lay his flaws bare, or trim out the objectionable stuff and make a piece of entertainment. Spielberg and screenwriter Zak Penn, perhaps unsurprisingly, go with the latter. So was this the right move, or a missed opportunity to drag Cline’s problematic ideas into the light?

REVIEW: 'A Wrinkle in Time'? More like give me back my time.

Visually, A Wrinkle in Time can be pretty exciting – just like how Disney managed to inject a kaleidoscope of colours and eye candy for Alice in Wonderland… but does it work here? I’m not sure it does; the colourful overtones don’t match L’Engle’s weirdly dark book.

True North Streaming: The Best New Titles on Netflix Canada, March 14/18

True North Streaming is a semi-regular column highlighting some of the best new additions to Netflix’s Canadian service. Like many of you, every so often I get a pleasant surprise when I discover a cool movie or TV show that’s just popped up on Netflix’s often-maligned sister platform. These posts will help you filter through the often quirky mix of Netflix Canada’s offerings and find the most valuable ways to waste some time.

And with that, in no particular order…

REVIEW: 'Annihilation' (or what Alex Garland is trying to do to my mind)

The problem with a lot of modern horror-thriller sci-fi films is that it’s quite obvious which characters will survive and which ones won’t. I think, over the decades, plot twists that seemed original are much more commonplace now, but Annihilation avoids most of that by telling the audience the result of the expedition in its very first scenes. Self-destruction is briefly mentioned in a line of dialogue but it’s a pervasive theme throughout the entire film, and one of its strengths is showing how each character deals with death and pain and how they ultimately choose to end their fight.

REVIEW: ‘Mute’ is a plodding, unfocused spiritual sequel

Sadly, despite the potential, what Jones delivers with Mute is a classic example of a passion project that should have stayed on the page. The film is admirably small-scale, when a lot of futuristic science fiction aims to make big statements about humanity. But taking a narrow, Black Mirror approach to the story can’t save it from an emotionally distant main character or a repetitive, fractured plot. At times, you can almost feel Jones waffling over what to include in his story: more of Alexander Skarsgård gazing listlessly at reused sets from Blade Runner 2049, or more of Paul Rudd’s obnoxious mustache.

Film, New ReleasesRobert SnowFebruary 28, 2018mute, 2018, thriller, sci-fi, mystery, alexander skarsgard, sam rockwell, moon, duncan jones, paul rudd, justin theroux, berlin, futuristic, noir, review, movies, cinema, film, netflixComment

REVIEW: ‘Black Panther’ is a carefully wrought political film…plus superheroes

It turns out that this shouldn’t be a surprise. The form of representation offered by Ryan Coogler’s new film is a powerful one. Even though the Black Panther character isn’t the first black superhero to lead his own film, Marvel’s latest outing makes some new and important strides in how it handles race in this genre. Most visibly, it puts a comparatively huge cast of black actors in all the central roles, something that is still rare in films of this size. And narratively, the status of black and African people - including the competing ideas on how to improve it - is deeply woven into the story. It doesn’t feel painted-on, as socio-political issues too often are in superhero films (even in the Marvel universe – I’m looking at you, The Winter Soldier).

REVIEW: ‘The Cloverfield Paradox’ is an astonishingly silly bundle of loose ends

Such is the fate of The Cloverfield Paradox, a stunningly well-cast sci-fi based on a Black List script, which seems to have undergone so much re-tooling, at every stage of production, that it barely resembles a completed film. There are plenty of ideas on display here (literally: the film crams in quantum entanglement, meeting your doppelganger, outer-space espionage, an energy crisis, mind-controlling worms, and more). But most of the concepts are hurriedly introduced and then abandoned, leaving behind an experience that feels like a generic mashup of every sci-fi release from the past thirty years.

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