Features & Reviews

Note: This review covers episodes 1-4 of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

10 years after embarking on a quest to defeat the Demon King, a band of four heroes return home to the uproarious applause of the kingdom’s citizens. There’s Himmel the hero, Eisen the dwarven warrior, Heiter the priest, and they’re all basking from the end of a dark era. And then there’s Frieren the elven mage who, true to her ancestry, is hundreds of years older than her human companions. For the title hero, saving the wor...

In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mario and Luigi are two Italian-American Brooklynites who quit their day jobs to start their own independent plumbing venture. Problem is, these two entrepreneurs are in over their heads, at least, that’s what their family and former employers think. No one believes in them, and Mario, especially, detests being made to feel small, so when the business opportunity of a lifetime appears, he drags his brother to save Brooklyn’s sewage problem. One wrong turn in the s...

On paper, a Dungeons & Dragons action comedy produced in today’s Hollywood sounds like a disaster. Dark Universe, DCEU, X-Men — to the groan of fans everywhere, we’ve been down this disappointing road. Might as well add it to the list of failed MCU cash-ins, right? Wrong. Instead, directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (Game Night, Horrible Bosses, Spider-Man: Homecoming) beat the odds. Despite playing it safe, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves re-introduces the joy of humorou...

Simply put, it’s the perfect chemistry of Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, and above all else, director Nia DaCosta’s strong ear for humor in The Marvels, the MCU’s latest team-up movie, that deserves the highest praise.

Though you can mostly skate by refreshing on MCU lore, The Marvels is mostly a sequel to Captain Marvel. After avenging the Supreme Intelligence, Carol Danvers (the cosmic “Annihilator”) unknowingly inserts herself into the Kree/Skrull civil war, bearing the guilt and...

Similar to Nick Fury’s overdue return to Earth, Marvel’s Secret Invasion feels late to the party. Apart from a few stellar entries, Phase 4’s generally inconsistent quality led many to question whether the MCU’s peak performance had truly come and gone. That’s the general sentiment riding on Nick Fury’s tired, diminished demeanor — Earth’s mightiest hero wrangler spent the last couple years as an aged, deeply traumatized recluse. And perhaps the first two episodes of Secret Invasion examine Fury...

Paramount’s latest attempt to recharge the robots in disguise serves all the highs and lows one would expect from the seventh installment, or more technically, the second act of a rebooted prequel. Oh, how far we’ve come. Phoning in perhaps the best entry since Transformers (2007), director Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II) does his absolute damnedest to deliver an executive’s bulleted list of impossible demands: To introduce a new brand of Transformers to the big screen, the Maximals, and to, you’d n...