In a summer movie season that has seen the unlikely pairing of Oppenheimer and Barbie dominate the box office, two surefire franchises have found it a bit more difficult than anticipated to generate sales. While Oppenheimer and Barbie have both faired well with critics and audiences, Christopher McQuarrie’s (The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher) Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One has scored just as well, but whose box office revenue may have been slighted due to the Oppenheimer/Barbie dual release date two weeks after. It may have made the Mission Impossible franchise’s seventh movie out of sight, out of mind a little too quickly. Dead Reckoning Part One is a film that should be seen in the theater, which many will agree with. Saying that it is better than Oppenheimer and Barbie is an unpopular opinion but one that I believe to be true. The novelty of Oppenheimer and Barbie is undoubtedly an allure over the seventh installment of a franchise and is something I do understand and appreciate. However, as a whole, I found Dead Reckoning Part One to be far more entertaining and better executed.
Continue reading Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
The first major letdown of 2023 is, without a doubt, the Adam Driver-led (
For as impressive as Dan Trachtenberg’s (
Everything Everywhere All At Once has slowly and quietly followed the established template of A24, a studio known for releasing groundbreaking, original, and independent movies. Through initial word of mouth, the co-directed film by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (who also co-wrote), Everything Everywhere All At Once, has become a movie that everyone has at least heard of, even if it has not been seen. Other nonconventional A24 films that had a lot of buzz around them and ended up earning Best Picture nominations in the last half dozen years include 
I love a good survival film. Before starting a recent movie, the trailer for Małgorzata Szumowska’s (Never Gonna Snow Again) Infinite Storm instantly caught my attention. After watching the first half of the adrenaline-inducing preview, I closed my eyes and plugged my ears for the rest. I had seen enough to know that this was a movie that I wanted to see, and I didn’t want anything more to spoil that future experience. Infinite Storm surprised me. While it didn’t have nearly the extended intensity that the preview suggested, it also didn’t follow a predictable formula that would have left this movie lost in the shuffle compared to other survival movies. While a decent film with heartfelt ambition, Infinite Storm failed to wow and was doomed by a lousy script.