213 Best Releases Rated PG-13 (Page 8)
Infinite
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021), Free Guy (2021), The Suicide Squad (2021),
The action genre has a special built-in cheat code where the movie can be so stupid that it becomes a fun experience. There’re also action films like Antoine Fuqua’s Infinite, streaming on Paramount Plus this month, which is idiotic on a level that’s so extreme it becomes a chore to watch. Continue Reading →
A Prairie Home Companion
A few days ago, Quentin Tarantino went on a podcast. The topic of final films came up with him stating he wanted to go out on a high note because, in his view, there had been too many cases of great filmmakers going out with substandard works. Now, this isn’t always the case, but there is a long list of directors who concluded their careers on less-than-stellar works. Continue Reading →
In the Heights
SimilarDriving Miss Daisy (1989),
Watch aftertick tick... BOOM! (2021), West Side Story (2021),
StudioEndeavor Content,
During his sophomore year at Wesleyan University in 1999, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a draft of his debut play. At first, he “had one song and a title: In the Heights.” Soon after, the musical would premiere at the school’s student-run theater. John Buffalo Miller and Quiara Alegría Hudes helped revise it in the following years, and then it snowballed. It premiered off-Broadway in 2005, went to Broadway in 2008, and had international tours throughout the 2010s. A film adaptation felt like the natural next step, and over two decades after its inception, it arrives with a screenplay from Hudes and Jon M. Chu directing. Continue Reading →
Pearl Harbor
80 minutes into Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, the titular surprise attack finally arrives. It is, without a doubt, one of the most virtuosic action set pieces ever committed to the screen, a flawlessly orchestrated symphony of carnage that burns for close to 40 minutes. Everything that you could possibly hope for from a maximalist, hyperkinetic blockbuster spectacle is here. There’s fire cascading, plumes of black smoke rising, bullets and bombs raining down, planes tumbling from the skies, boats being torn asunder, and bodies being flung about like ragdolls. Annihilation and national tragedy have never looked so stunning or—and it feels gross saying this—felt so exhilarating. Continue Reading →
Cruella
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021), Free Guy (2021), Thanksgiving (2023), The Suicide Squad (2021),
StudioWalt Disney Pictures,
Cruella de Vil is an A-List villain in a B-List franchise. Sure, 101 Dalmatians and its spinoffs have their charms, but no other aspect in the franchise has the staying power of Cruella and her iconic theme song. It’s no surprise that Disney would release an origin story for the character with Craig Gillespie’s Cruella. It’s a logical step for the company to take, but the iconic villain presents a major stumbling block: how can you make a villainess whose traditional motivation is to kill dogs for a coat into a likable hero, or at least an antihero? Continue Reading →
Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “May you live in interesting times,” understand this: we’re living in them right now. It’s a historically awful time of racial unrest, an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, and a global pandemic that’s coldly highlighted how little many of us care about our fellow humans. Optimism is in very limited supply at the moment, and so we cling to the little things that give us joy, and a reason to keep going the next day. Things like Lil Nas X’s Twitter feed, or Ted Lasso, or Lady Gaga branded Oreo cookies. Things like Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar, which in better times might have made barely a blip on the pop culture radar, but right now feels like a cool drink of water on a very hot day, and is a cult hit in the making. Continue Reading →
Carmen: A Hip Hopera
SimilarA History of Violence (2005), Match Point (2005), Shooter (2007), West Side Story (2021),
The best way to enjoy MTV’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera is with the subtitles on. That way you can catch every outrageous word of Sekani Williams’ singular lyrics. 20 years after its release in 2001, Carmen: A Hip Hopera remains unique, in a genre all its own. Continue Reading →
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
Just a few days after he passed, it was clear that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 would be Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final film. Back in 2012, Lionsgate made the financial decision to milk a fourth movie out of the Hunger Games trilogy, keeping their cash cow going until November 2015. While Catching Fire made for a worthwhile outing in its own right, the back half of the series does its best to annihilate any goodwill it’d accumulated. Continue Reading →
Jack
There was a trend when YouTube first launched, one that still pops up from time to time, where a skilled editor will take a film such as Dumb and Dumber or Elf and recut the trailer as a horror film. These pet projects are amusing at first glance, and serve to highlight deeply disturbing elements of classic comedies generally played for laughs. They demonstrate the power certain filmmakers have to elicit a specific audience response often diametrically opposed to the given circumstances on screen. Continue Reading →
Peggy Sue Got Married
As Gena Radcliffe laid out in her keynote, Francis Ford Coppola’s work most often reflects an ambition to blow out plot points to near-operatic proportions. Coppola makes it literal in The Godfather series, but one can observe it throughout his career—in Harry Caul’s outsized paranoia, the psychological horror of Apocalypse Now, the costuming of Dracula (and everything else come to it), the teen and gang dynamics of both The Outsiders and Rumble Fish and so on. Continue Reading →
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
This is a little embarrassing – I’m pretty sure The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was my first exposure to Philip Seymour Hoffman. As I’ve said before, he didn’t appear in many blockbusters, and when I was fifteen (watching this Hunger Games sequel on the largest screen I could find), well, I watched a lot of blockbusters. But on second look, my embarrassment isn’t warranted. Catching Fire, and Hoffman’s work in it, is far better than I’d remembered. Continue Reading →
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
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Josie and the Pussycats
By the time Josie and the Pussycats premiered in theaters in April 2001, the pop culture universe of the early aughts was already in full swing. Dissenting and raging against the machine was out, and corporate partnerships and glossy production values were in. Total Request Live was the hottest television show on the air, and it had only been eleven months after Britney Spears released Oops! I Did it Again and became the official celebrity endorser for Got Milk, Clairol, and Polaroid. The Spice Girls had just gone on hiatus, and it was the height of the Backstreet Boys vs. N*SYNC fan wars. Post Y2K and only a few months before 9/11, the Dot-com bubble was imploding and consumerism was already at an all time high. Continue Reading →
Thunder Force
Mere moments before the whole world shut down last year, I reviewed the Vin Diesel vehicle/comic adaptation Bloodshot. In that review, I talked about how the film often felt like a refuge from another time, an earlier era of superhero movies, and that there was a certain charm in that. Thunder Force similarly feels like a holdover from a different time, but as an anachronism, it offers far less charm. If Bloodshot felt like a pale but pleasant copy of films from the Raimi Spider-Man portion of the era, Thunder Force feels a bit more like Sky High’s cousin, obsessed with seeming more mature. Continue Reading →
My Blueberry Nights
Though My Blueberry Nights has been largely left untouched in the renaissance of Wong Kar-wai’s work like the pies at its center of the film, it’s finally time to cut a slice and see what can be savored. From the outside, it looks like a Kar-wai blueberry pie. It has a sugar crisped lid that’s inviting and promises hidden depths. Yet, as our fork reaches the bottom, we find it soggy. Continue Reading →
Lucas
As we continue the bleak discourse about how well pop culture of the past has aged (or hasn’t, rather), it’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of 80s comedies aren’t going to hold up to present day scrutiny. Hobbled by casual racism, sexism and homophobia (not to mention rape gags, if you’re Revenge of the Nerds), to watch many of them now is to cringe in discomfort. Teen comedies didn’t often escape it either, as evidenced by the vastly different Porky’s and Sixteen Candles, both of which aged like milk. It’s interesting that the comedies that addressed “dark” subjects, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (abortion) and Heathers (suicide) are the ones that managed to survive relatively unscathed. Continue Reading →
Godzilla vs. Kong
SimilarGodzilla Raids Again (1955), Night at the Museum (2006),
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021), The Suicide Squad (2021),
One of the most fascinating things about Godzilla -- whether in his original Japanese provenance in his long-running series of films, or in the comparatively-recent "MonsterVerse" Westernization of the big lizard, courtesy of Warner Bros. and Legendary -- is that he's so malleable. On the one hand (as with the original 1954 Ishiro Honda film and Gareth Edwards' flawed but philosophically-intriguing 2014 reboot), he can be a poignant vehicle to explore the apocalyptic anxieties of nations ravaged by atomic bombs and climate change. Continue Reading →
春光乍洩
Like most pieces of queer cinema, Happy Together was widely misunderstood on its initial release. Looking back on its reviews in 1997 by American critics, there’s a puzzling emphasis on the narrative. Specifically, many critics at the time took umbrage for what they perceived as a “laggy” storyline. So prominent were these criticisms that they ended up giving the film a Metacritic score just one point about Star Wars: Episode III- Revenge of the Sith. Continue Reading →
重慶森林
"Everything expires. Is there anything in this world that doesn't?" Continue Reading →
Charli XCX: Alone Together
Bradley Bell and Pablo Jones-Soler assemble a freewheeling look at the artistic process from soup to nuts.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.)
A good number of the films on display at this year’s SXSW festival are works that are inextricably tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, either by using at as a part of the plot or because of the limitations to the production process instilled by quarantine procedures. Alone Together, which had its world premiere at the festival, takes those approaches one step further by serving as a documentary watching an artist—in this case, avant-pop queen Charli XCX—as she goes about her work under the new restrictions brought on by the current reality. Continue Reading →
Coming 2 America
Coming 2 America Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5lrkdvEZGg&ab_channel=AmazonPrimeVideo
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