Rolling Stone

You will likely have no idea what you have just seen, besides that it’s simply, unabashedly, unashamedly brilliant.

You’ve spent close to 80 minutes as a listener. But before you leave the theater or shut off your laptop, it’s asking you to be a witness.

The director and Cruise, as well as the crew and supporting cast...have purposefully given us something messy, ungainly, clever to a fault, and designed to play like a shriek of rage and pain. It’s impossible to simply dismiss as a mistake, and equally impossible to declare that it works in almost any capacity.

Courtesy of the director and star, we now get both a gritty, top-shelf action movie and an extraordinary character study, a much stronger and far more intriguing phoenix rising from those corporate ashes. Give thanks to your respective moms for that.

It’s hypermasculine cinema, perfect for the stoic man in your life who’d rather face down a pitiless Mother Nature than talk about his relationship with his mother.

Primetime recounts how this show didn’t create a sense of collective bloodlust, it just rode a wave that was already there. Then it tells us we’re free to go, knowing what awaits us right outside the front door.

Resident Evil is, hands down, one of the single best video-game screen adaptations to date, yet works in a way that doesn’t feel like an adaptation, doesn’t rely on fan service and Easter-egg hunts to pay homage, and doesn’t skimp on the dynamics that made the game so endlessly playable.

It desperately wants to be your grandfather’s Great Depression survivalist thriller, and is willing to go the extra 100 miles and brave seriously rough-looking terrain to do it. That alone makes it worth it’s you-know-what in retro-cinema du testosterone gold.

This story of oppression, protest, political violence, and populist uprisings is over 600 years old. It could not feel more relevant or timely.

While the story itself will seem very familiar, the undercurrents of contempt will come off as more than a little problematic, and the various subplots orbiting the film’s main narrative will run the gamut from pretty convenient to extremely WTF, Rock has the benefit of a thermonuclear weapon in his arsenal. Her name is Rosalind Eleazar.