Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 11:15AM Do you like the Passengers trailer? The film, opening December 21st, is a mainstream-aimed original. Those are not quite an endangered species (yet) even though it feels that way after this summer of numbing sequels, remakes, and franchise extensions.
Sunday, July 24, 2016 at 3:45PM 
They're trying to trick us with this new Wonder Woman poster. Look at all that COLOR. From WB/DC? Could it be possible? Mmmm yes and no.
Since it was Comic Con weekend the studios were working hard to inundate fans with new superhero footage and the second Wonder Woman trailer is here... which has some color to it but a lot of blue grays since that's how DC (and action movies) likes to play it these days. The trailer is a bit premature as the film is not due for 11 months but we'll take it. It looks pretty good and maybe, just maybe, they'll do right by the Amazon princess?
Our Yes No Maybe So is after the jump but first things first. You must know that we do deeply dig The Little Mermaid shoutout which begins the trailer. Steve Trevor is all washed up on shore like a Prince Eric thirst trap and Diana is eager to drink him up...
Saturday, July 16, 2016 at 8:26PM This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad
Remember when Sony rebooted Sam Raimi’s take on Spider-Man (2002) with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)? Their whole conceit at the time appeared to be “What if you didn’t know the story?” so they just told it again. Only everyone actually did know the story. The result was an instantly forgettable retread, useless but for the printing of money. While that may have been the whole point, it left a lousy corporate aftertaste. It took the world gargling with some Marvel Studios mouthwash (aka Captain America: Civil War) to make people excited about Spidey again.
The good news is that the mega corporation appears to have learned from their mistakes. Ghostbusters NOW does not moronically assume you don’t know Ghostbusters THEN. Sure, it’s the same story again — the Ghostbusters set up shop, refine technobabble gadgets, fight against a supernatural invasion of New York and the bureaucrats that get in their way — but writer/director Paul Feig and his cowriter Katie Dippold (who wrote The Heat together) have correctly guessed that the fun of the movie will be in the makeover.
the ladies fighting the (undead) patriarchy
The story gets a new look, freshened up details, and most famously, four female Ghostbusters and a male receptionist in place of the original’s four men and a female receptionist; that gender inversion proved more revolutionary that any rational human might have expected because a lot of manbabies have been freaking out on the internet ever since...
Monday, July 4, 2016 at 3:00PM 
Editor's Note: This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. Our "Swing Tarzan Swing" column, investigating the shifting portrayals and quality of Tarzan films over pop culture history will resume next weekend. We'll circle back to Skarsgård at the end.
You know that antipiracy text that sometimes appears on movie screens now post-credits? "The making and legal distribution of this film supported over X-many thousands of jobs." This message kept bothering me the day after seeing The Legend of Tarzan (2016). Yes, piracy is bad but you know what else is terrible? That none of those jobs were for animal trainers! I swear that not a single real animal appears in the new film, which has to be a first for a Tarzan film. And hopefully a last. It's all computer generated imagery for this jungle adventure...
Sunday, June 12, 2016 at 12:15PM 
Tim here. Today we celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the birth of producer-director-writer Irwin Allen, one of the great junk-food purveyors in Hollywood cinema. It's by no means true that Allen invented the disaster movie (a genre stretching back into the 1930s), nor even the uniquely '70s-style incarnation of the form, with an impressively well-stocked larder of overtalented, underpaid stars filling out the clichéd melodramas of addiction and marital strife that tend to form the plots of these movie (Airport got there first). But it was under Allen's hand that disaster movies became the greatest, gaudiest spectacles of the decade.
Allen was not always a high-end schlockmeister. In fact, he began his career as an Oscar-winner, taking home a Best Documentary Feature award for 1953's The Sea Around Us, based on a Rachel L. Carson book. Curiously his first taste of the effects-driven spectacle that would typify his later films came in as a way of fleshing out his documentaries. One sequence of his 1956 film The Animal World, on dinosaurs, featured effects by the great Ray Harryhausen, and his very next film was his first all-star extravaganza, the cameo-packed The Story of Mankind.
