Trace Sauveur

Robin Hood, at times, speaks about his popular persona and seems to be in direct conversation with the generations of stories that would surround his name hundreds of years into the future. It’s an interesting wrinkle, but one stamped out by the film’s more predictable dynamics: the world-weary savage, his unexpected young companion, and the path to breaking cycles of violence. These are foundational ideas that help make up the bedrock of similar mature fables. The Death of Robin Hood grounds them into dust with a brooding glare.

It’s plainly imperfect: overlong, sometimes too winking, and occasionally flattened by the digitally homogenized look of modern blockbusters. But as a version of the property that bridges demographic and generational gaps to deliver a worthwhile take on a virtually dead franchise, it has at least a little bit of power.

For viewers who like their studio frights straightforward, it’s a fun enough ride through well-traveled territory, like a highway where you already know the location of every rest stop.

The Smashing Machine is sensitive, texturally rich, and technically strong. But the melodrama of Mark Kerr—the real one—was somehow more potent when we saw it unfiltered.

Del Toro’s fables are always beautiful but sometimes irregular in connecting their artistry to fully cogent characters and themes. With Frankenstein, he has the freedom to reconstruct a story and motifs he knows by heart into a movie that’s intimately familiar with the soul of the original material, but reaches the conclusions on its own terms.

For a mystery, Wake Up Dead Man is surprisingly bad at making its ensemble feel essential to the stakes.

Death of a Unicorn may not be much more than another peg in an era of eat-the-rich cinema that has certainly become oversaturated in this form, yet time and time again its reflection of our times feels befitting.

Feig and company’s extension of the material gleefully indulges in the same silly B-movie theatrics, including but not limited to: murder, extortion, opulent wardrobes, twin confusion, and incestuous relationships. On one level, its self-awareness and love for its own convoluted nature make it seductively enjoyable. On another, it feels like a familiar, less effective retread of ground already well-tread by its predecessor.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice acts as something of an inverse to its predecessor: Whereas the first film follows a relatively simple throughline of small-town domesticity coming crashing down under the sudden cognizance of life after death, its sequel is defined by an excess of storylines, all vying for their claim to a meager slice of the 100-minute runtime.

After 55 years of different directions, this is far from the most exciting Planet of the Apes has been, but it’s also far from the worst, and I’m open to seeing wherever this leads.