“Avengers: Infinity War” is more a piece of connective tissue than a movie. Featuring an expansive collection of cinematic superheroes united in opposition to an intergalactic, genocidal environmentalist, there are enough characters here for ten movies, and enough plot for half of one. A decade in the making, the film features dozens of superheroes, precious …
Can an advertisement be entertainment, or even classified as art? Consumers are likely to find ads of any form or length to be somewhere between innocuous and deserving of extreme cynicism, save for those precious television commercials that are interrupted by some dumb championship football game. It is widely believed that in an ideal world, …
This year’s Oscar-nominated short films will be released in select cities next month, but a vastly inferior program of shorts will sell at least 10 times the number of tickets. “Movie 43,” as it’s titled for no apparent reason, follows the Hollywood moneymaking formula recently re-popularized by “Valentine’s Day” and “New Year’s Eve”: maximize star-power …
The killing of Usama bin Laden is widely regarded as the United States’ biggest foreign policy triumph since the Cold War, so when the inevitable film about how the C.I.A. accomplished the heroic task was announced, it was reasonable to dread that the result would be blindingly patriotic and full of phony climaxes. I pictured …
While I have long detested the employment of the phrase “wait for HBO” among critics–as a staunch defender of the theatrical experience, I believe most films are either good enough to warrant a night out or aren’t worth seeing, period–“The Five-Year Engagement” so perfectly fits the cliché that I may have to break with tradition …
