Even with this less than glorious landing, the sheer swing of such an off-kilter structure that still lavishes in all the expensive trappings of castles, gowns, and armaments is such a novelty that it’s hard to resist admiring it.
Author: Emily Wheeler
Member of the Indiana Film Journalists Association. Rotten Tomatoes certified critic. Movie omnivore.
This is how you put people to sleep, if you’re lucky enough not to piss them off.
Their Tammy Faye is a caricature masquerading as a real person. The assertion that they find out who she really is, or even present a twisted, subjective version, is nothing but a beautiful lie.
These mild ups and downs leave us with a lackluster entry in a franchise saddled with ambitious but thorny ideas. It’s far from a disaster, but the taste it leaves in your mouth isn’t sickening so much as it is bitter. Horror with these sorts of themes shouldn’t leave you feeling good, but the discomfort should come from it rattling uncomfortable truths, not mishandling them.
Smaller in scale than recent outings and less afraid of its characters’ emotions, it introduces the wayward but destined for greatness Shang-Chi with plenty of the tricks the MCU used to create its box office supremacy while finally pushing the series in a mildly different direction.
The show itself is decidedly not about glory, instead twisting itself into a pitch black comedic nightmare where every garish color and perfected pose covers a wellspring of pain and anger.
Jungle Cruise is not the artistically devoid offering you may have feared, but it’s not stretching itself to be anything too great, either. Instead, it settles for being a lark, and its winning cast nails the frivolous good time it aims to be.
Betty is a disrupter. A disrupter of expectations, of stereotypes, of procedure. It says forget six seasons and a movie, we’re going to make a movie and then some television. It says forget your straight, white, male world, we’re going to follow a bunch of young women, some queer and not all white. It says forget plot, just vibe.
Emily Wheeler Movie Ops 