Salma Hayek

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

  • Title: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
  • IMDb: link

Arguably the best thing to come out of the Shrek franchise, the legendary hero Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) returns for a sequel to his 2011 solo film. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is exactly what you’d expect. Opening with a big action sequence, the script then sets up the main plot of the movie with Puss in Boots being down the the ninth, and last, of his nine lives. After a bit of hiding, the character reemerges learning of a wish that could restore his lives and his courage.

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Eternals

  • Title: Eternals
  • IMDb: link

Eternals is ambitious as hell. It may be the most ambitious movie Marvel has attempted since weaving together various threads into a single story in The Avengers. Sadly, it’s nowhere near as successful. With an opening crawl, monologues aplenty, and flashbacks, Eternals struggles to introduce and flesh out a dozen characters, their purpose, their backstory, and their place in the MCU.

I’ll give writer/director Chloé Zhao credit for assembling a talented and diverse cast, but with so many characters to keep track of (many of who disappear for large amounts of screentime) more than once I forgot an actor was even in the film.

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The Hitman’s Bodyguard

  • Title: The Hitman’s Bodyguard
  • IMDb: link

The Hitman's Bodyguard movie reviewWhen searching for something, anything, positive to say about a bad movie you can almost always fall back on “Well, at least it was in focus.” Sadly, I can’t even offer that most basic of compliments to The Hitman’s Bodyguard in which any strong ambient light destroys the focus of the shot, highlighting characters in a fuzzy glow while blurring out the entire background in a bizarrely amateurish manner.

Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson star in an uninspired buddy comedy about a once-proud bodyguard and his newest client, a man who has attempted to kill him on numerous occasions, who he needs to deliver in time to testify against a bland movie villain (Gary Oldman) for reasons that only makes sense in a script where things explode for no reason whatsoever.

Although there are some minor chuckles to be had (mostly from the pair adlibbing), and one strong chase sequence around the canals of Amsterdam, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is an uninspired mess featuring two actors screaming at each other for the better part of two hours.

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Sausage Party

  • Title: Sausage Party
  • IMDb: link

Sausage PartyThis movie is fucked up. Offering us a glimpse into the lives on anthropomorphic food and other assorted items in a grocery store who sing about the promised land after being bought by god-like humans, Sausage Party follows the misadventures of a hot dog named Frank (Seth Rogen) and his friends (Michael Cera, Kristen Wiig, David Krumholtz, Edward Norton, and Salma Hayek) who discover the truth about what really happens to food in the kitchen. Wrong in (mostly) all the right ways, it has to be seen to be believed.

Offering an inspired amount of cursing and obvious jokes (the bagel doesn’t get along with the lavash, the douche is, well, a real douche) along with several genuinely funny moments, the script by Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Rogen, and Evan Goldberg gets too infatuated with sexual innuendo at times (and ignores the inevitable truth of what will happen to all the characters), but while it lasts Sausage Party delivers an animated experience unlike anything you’ve seen before on the big screen.

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