Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. The summer movie season is upon us, which means it’s time for a semi-annual tradition: singing the praises of the most unloved, underperforming, or simply forgotten summer blockbusters.
You can see how it happened. The executives at Warner Bros. didn’t set out to destroy the Batman mythos or to make unwatchably shitty Batman movies that would put both the character and the superhero movie genre at large into a state of prolonged stasis. They just wanted a hit. Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, from 1992,…
“I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap,” declares Kevin Costner’s fading minor-league catcher Crash Davis in a famous scene in Bull Durham, the movie that kicked off…
The Coen brothers’ 2007 film No Country For Old Men is unlike the traditional westerns it pays homage to. The good guy gets shot, the bad guy gets away, and the audience is left feeling uneasy about the whole experience. Perhaps the most non-traditional moment of the entire film is its seemingly unrelated closing…
Deadline reports that Tommy Lee Jones and Brad Pitts are headed to space, with both actors close to signing on to James Gray’s new film, Ad Astra. The plot kind of sounds like a darker, more Joseph Conrad-y version of the parental space drama of Interstellar, with Pitt as an astronaut trying to figure out what…
Who he is: Chester Phillips
Something funny happened to action movies in the ’90s. They became, after a fashion, respectable. The action blockbusters of the ’80s had made a ton of money, but they always looked and moved like B-movies, even when they had extravagant budgets. Brutality and crassness were big parts of their appeal. But in the ’90s,…
Has enough time yet passed for a new Jason Statham action thriller to qualify as a throwback? Even in their mid-’00s heyday, Statham’s movies felt like descendants of earlier eras, offering ’80s excess on ’70s budgets; it’s one reason he was so at home in Sylvester Stallone’s Expendables crew. But Statham’s solo…
Do us a favor and close your eyes. (Did you close them? Good.) Now, whisper the words “Fast” and “Furious” to yourself. What images come ramping into your head, like so many Hondas winding their way through the infinite mental highways of your mind? Do you see glistening, be-tank-topped muscles? An endless labyrinth…
“I remember everything.” That’s the first line of dialogue in Jason Bourne, spoken over a black screen by the title character, presumably for the benefit of viewers who may have forgotten that everyone’s favorite amnesiac super-soldier finally regained his lost memories during his last mission. Bourne remembers…
To all but the most refined action-movie connoisseurs, Jason Statham’s many films in the genre can seem a bit interchangeable. Obviously, though, they’re really very different: Furious 7 was the one where he was a bad guy, The Transporter was the one where he drove a car a lot, Crank was the one where everything was…
For most of the ’70s, there was something fundamentally conservative about American action movies—or, anyway, about non-blaxploitation American action movies. Films like Dirty Harry and Death Wish celebrated rebellious types like maverick cops and outside-the-law vigilantes. But all of them were, on a more basic…
Violent, low-IQ psychopath Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner) is implanted with the memories of a dead spy by the CIA, only to escape in London, where he uses his newly acquired skills to disable security systems, speak French (which be believes is Spanish), make waffles, and wreak havoc, all the while dodging…
Though he spent the bulk of the ’90s playing iconic heroes like Wyatt Earp and Robin Hood, Kevin Costner’s been eager to tap into his dark side as of late. His latest film, Criminal, sees him playing a volatile death-row inmate who, for some reason, is given a chance at redemption when he’s implanted with a CIA…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by the week’s new releases or premieres. This week: The sequel to blatant Die Hard knockoff Olympus Has Fallen hits theaters Friday, so let’s look back on some other Die Hard knockoffs, all of them much better than Olympus Has Fallen.
After making his name playing straight-arrow good guy—from Elliott Ness to Robin Hood to a certain pee-drinking man-fish—Kevin Costner has taken to playing against type in recent years, as he does here in Criminal, where he plays a remorseless, unfeeling killer. There’s a twist, however, as Gary Oldman’s CIA boss…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: The Hateful Eight and The Revenant have us thinking about modern Westerns.
It turns out we can thank President Obama for the lack of Matt Damon-led Bourne movies. While doing some press for The Martian, the actor let slip the reason for his hiatus from playing super-soldier Jason Bourne—he and director Paul Greengrass were waiting for “the world to change.”
Matt Damon will once again be putting on the iconic nondescript outfit and generic, Matt Damon-y haircut of Jason Bourne for a yet-untitled fifth Bourne movie, and Variety is reporting that famous Hollywood tough guy Tommy Lee Jones will be joining him on this next globe-trotting adventure. Well, not “joining him” per…
If the ’90s taught us anything, it’s that baby boomers love movie versions of the TV shows they grew up with, from the reverent meta-parody of The Brady Bunch Movie to forgotten cash grabs like Car 54, Where Are You?. But one of the most well received television-to-film adaptations of the era was 1993’s The Fugitive. …