What I initially thought was nothing more than a cash grab using the Rocky moniker with the 2015 movie Creed, the Michael B. Jordan-led franchise has effectively carved out a niche in sports cinema. Dare I make the blasphemous claim that the first three Creed movies are better than the first three Rocky movies? I’m not willing to go that far, though I can confidently say that Creed III is much better than the cartoonish Rocky III, the weakest of the first four Rocky films.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did him a solid by selecting him as a Best Actor nominee, it does feel, in a way, that Bill Nighy (Love Actually, Notes on a Scandal) was chosen for a remarkable lengthy career rather than his performance in Oliver Hermanus (Moffie, The Endless River) underwhelming Living. While it scores high on Rotten Tomatoes (critics – 96%, audiences 86%), the film has a more realistic 7.5/10 on IMDB and 81 Metascore. Even those marks seem high for a mostly unremarkable movie. It earned just $2,000,000 domestically, which isn’t necessarily bad for an independent film but is relatively low for a movie with multiple Oscar nominations (Best Adapted Screenplay was the film’s second nomination category).
Love it or hate it. There isn’t much middle ground or neutrality regarding Damien Chazelle’s (La La Land, First Man) divisive Babylon, a fantastical look at the debaucherous look at the rise and fall of the Hollywood movie industry during the 1920s. While some might believe its 56% /52 % scores on Rotten Tomatoes suggest it’s an ordinary movie, those average scores may result from people either loving or hating it. I enjoyed the movie. It is far from being in my top ten of the year. With only a couple of 2022 films left to watch, Babylon sits at #16 (out of the 74 2022-released films I’ve seen). It’s a fine film and one that is worth viewing.
Heavy military boot comp movies cannot help but draw comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The groundbreaking drama showcased the great lengths that United States Military Academies sometimes go too far to “break” their recruits. Another great example is the under-appreciated but long-remembered G.I. Jane. Both films featured recruits that were not wanted (Full Metal Jacket with the obese, dimwitted Leonard “aka Gomer Pyle” Lawrence (played fantastically by Vincent D’Onofrio) in Full Metal Jacket or Demi Moore as the lone trial candidate of a U.S. Navy female integration program in G.I. Jane. A similar example is Men of Honor, the story of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the first African-American U.S. Navy Diver.
Since ‘Prey’ was aholdover before Disney bought Fox in 2019, the potential for post-theatrical streaming boosts was contractually limited.Had it been released in theaters, its post-theatrical afterlife would have begun not on Disney+ or Hulu but on HBO Max. However, if Disney wanted the film in theaters badly enough, they likely could have worked out a post-theatrical deal akin to ‘Death on theNile,‘ which premiered at home after theatrical on both Hulu and HBO Max. It didn’t, so theatrical was never in the cards.
What I initially thought was nothing more than a cash grab using the Rocky moniker with the 2015 movie Creed, the Michael B. Jordan-led franchise has effectively carved out a niche in sports cinema. Dare I make the blasphemous claim that the first three Creed movies are better than the first three Rocky movies? I’m not willing to go that far, though I can confidently say that Creed III is much better than the cartoonish Rocky III, the weakest of the first four Rocky films.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did him a solid by selecting him as a Best Actor nominee, it does feel, in a way, that Bill Nighy (Love Actually, Notes on a Scandal) was chosen for a remarkable lengthy career rather than his performance in Oliver Hermanus (Moffie, The Endless River) underwhelming Living. While it s
Love it or hate it. There isn’t much middle ground or neutrality regarding Damien Chazelle’s (
Heavy military boot comp movies cannot help but draw comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The groundbreaking drama showcased the great lengths that United States Military Academies sometimes go too far to “break” their recruits. Another great example is the under-appreciated but long-remembered G.I. Jane. Both films featured recruits that were not wanted (Full Metal Jacket with the obese, dimwitted Leonard “aka Gomer Pyle” Lawrence (played fantastically by Vincent D’Onofrio) in Full Metal Jacket or Demi Moore as the lone trial candidate of a U.S. Navy female integration program in G.I. Jane. A similar example is Men of Honor, the story of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the first African-American U.S. Navy Diver.
For as impressive as Dan Trachtenberg’s (