I Still Believe in Heroes

Photo via Lionsgate Carlos Lopez Estrada makes his feature film debut with  Blindspotting , a timely drama starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. The film, which was co-written by Diggs and Casal, is perhaps one of the most important films that anyone can see given today’s social climate. The story follows Collin (Diggs) in the months following his release from prison. With three days remaining on his probation, all he has to do is stay out of trouble in order to be a free man. That proves to be easier said than done with his troublemaking best friend, Miles (Casal), hanging around him all the time. After witnessing a police officer fatally shooting an African-American man, Collin’s world gets flipped upside-down and he finds himself re-evaluating his relationship with Miles.             For a film that is 95 minutes long,  Blindspotting  has a lot of moving pieces, all of which are excellently develope...

Peyton Reed is back to direct  Ant-Man and the Wasp , the sequel to his 2015 surprise hit,  Ant-Man . The film takes place roughly two years after the events of  Captain America: Civil War , which saw Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) get arrested for helping Captain America during the airport battle in Germany. Lang, who has been under house arrest since  Civil War , now finds himself focusing on being a better father instead of being a superhero. When Hank (Michael Douglas) and Hope (Evangeline Lily) come to Scott with an urgent new mission, however, Scott must once again work outside the law and risk losing everything.  In a year that has already seen two heavy and dramatic films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe,  Ant-Man and the Wasp provides a much-needed breath of fresh air. One of the things I really appreciate about the  Ant-Man films is how small they are in scale. They are a reminder that not every superhero film needs to have serious global sta...

The great horror films are the ones that have something important to say. Yes, scares matter, but they need to amount to something. For a while, it seemed like horror films had nothing of importance to say. Scares seemed to be the ultimate goal and story was put in the backburner, and that led to a long stream of lackluster horror films. In recent years, however, we have seen genre re-defining films such as  The Conjuring , It Follows , A Quiet Place and  Get Out  restore some of the prestige that horror cinema once had.  Hereditary  is the latest film to accomplish this, and it is perhaps the most effective in doing so. Hereditary  is all about family. It’s about a family whose evil history comes back to haunt them and little by little begins to tear them apart. The film stars Toni Collette as Annie Graham, who at the beginning of the film finds herself speaking at her estranged mother’s funeral. Due to their strained relationship, Annie finds it h...

             In May of 2017, Universal Pictures announced that the Tom Cruise led The Mummy reboot would be the beginning of its own cinematic universe known as the Dark Universe. This cinematic universe would see Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s monster and Angelina Jolie was long rumored to join as the monster’s bride. Those of us who love the Universal classic monster films were thrilled by this announcement. To bring such incredible talent to our beloved monster films was a sign of great things, because why would they sign on if the material was anything less than amazing? Two weeks after this announcement, The Mummy was released and it became apparent almost immediately that this new film was both the beginning and the end for the Dark Universe. 2017’s The Mummy reboot is the latest attempt to bring back the classic Universal monsters, but not the only one. In 2014, Lu...

It has been five years since Guillermo del Toro’s original hit theaters, but Pacific Rim is finally back. Pacific Rim: Uprising is directed by Steven S. DeKnight, the man behind Marvel’s Daredevil series, and stars John Boyega as Jake Pentecost. Joining Boyega are fellow newcomers Scott Eastwood as Nate Lambert and Cailee Spaeny as Amara Namani. Burn Gorman, Charlie Day and Rinko Kikuchi return to reprise their roles from the original film. If you’ve never seen the original, don’t worry, Pacific Rim: Uprising does a well-enough job at filling the audience in on the events leading up to this film. Uprising picks up 10 years after the events of the original and it sets up a world that is still rebuilding after the devastating events from the war against the Kaiju. The film wastes no time in introducing the troublemaking Jake, son of fallen hero Stacker Pentecost. After running into trouble with the law, Jake is forced to train a new generation of Jaeger pilots in order...

Director and producer Greg Berlanti returns to the director’s chair for the first time since his 2010 film, Life as We Know It , to direct the new teen rom-com, Love, Simon . It is a historic film as it marks the first time a major studio has backed a teen rom-com with a gay character as the lead. It is a film that is far from perfect, but it is an incredible first step towards being more inclusive. The film stars Nick Robinson and features a great cast that includes Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Garner, Katherine Langford, Jorge Lendeborg Jr. and Keiynan Lonsdale.             Love, Simon opens up with Simon doing a quick voiceover on a montage that details how normal his life is aside from having one “huge-ass secret”. During this montage, we are introduced to all of the key characters in the film. He has a loving family, a tight group of friends and seems to do well in school. Despite all of this, Simon always seems to be at a s...

            We live in an era where remakes and sequels of beloved films are constantly coming out. Every once in a while, a classic or a highly popular film gets remade and it turns out so bad that people claim it “ruined the original”. One such case is Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic, Halloween. The purpose of this article is twofold. As always, I want to encourage readers to watch a classic film. With this article, however, I also want to try and dispel this notion that bad remakes/sequels ruin the original film.              John Carpenter’s original is widely considered to be a masterpiece and one of the founders of the slasher sub-genre. The story is a relatively simple one. It starts off in Haddonfield, Illinois in 1963 on Halloween night where a 6-year-old Michael Myers kills his older sister shortly after she has finished having ...

                  Director Ava Duvernay is back, this time helming Disney’s live-action adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wrinkle in Time .The famed director made history with this film when she became the first female African-American director to helm a live-action film with a budget of over $100 million and only the third female director overall to achieve that budget. The film boasts an impressive cast that includes Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Chris Pine and is led by Storm Reid. The film starts off with a short scene in which a young Meg (Reid) is spending time with her dad, Dr. Alex Murry (Pine). The film then jumps ahead to the present day where the four-year anniversary of Dr. Murry’s mysterious disappearance approaches. The first act moves quickly and it hastily portrays Meg as an outkast struggling to understand why her father left her family. Her 6-year-old genius brother ...

There are certain classics that, in theory, should be much harder to re-imagine than others. Often times, it’s very difficult to modernize certain aspects of a story, whether it be the topic or story plot. By all accounts, Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery thriller Rear Window should have been difficult to adapt in 2007. Rear Window ’s plot makes the film date itself more than other Hitchcock films. At the center of the 1954 film, which stars James Stewart, is L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, a photographer whose broken-leg forces him to be wheelchair-bound and unable to leave his house. Having nothing else to do, Jeff passes the time by spying on the people from the apartment complex across from his. When he sees what he believes to be a murder at the hands of a man named Thorwald, Jeff takes it upon himself to solve the crime. Rear Window remains one of Hitchcock’s most decorated films, so it is no surprise that eventually someone would try and remake it. The question, however, is how? The idea...