By the finale, nearly everything of early interest has succumbed to the same ol' visually indistinct, destruction-of-the-universe meaninglessness, with the added hangup of the action being almost insultingly stupid.

Given that it's the latest feature by Ari Aster, you can bet that the writer/director's Eddington, as it nears its conclusion, will boast startling violence and at least one memorable death. Yet none of the imagery in the film's climactic scenes quite compares to the gasp-inducing shock presented some 10 minutes in, when a disheveled, babbling, obviously unhealthy vagrant tumbles onto Joaquin Phoenix and coughs – hacks directly on his face.

A box-office smash, winner of three Academy Awards, and the film that effectively invented the phrase “summer blockbuster,” Steven Spielberg's landmark Jaws enjoys a 50th-anniversary outdoor screening at Rozz-Tox on July 25, this iconic work hailed by Roger Evert as "a sensationally effective action picture" and "a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings."

As most everyone will likely agree, the best thing about 1978's Superman is Christopher Reeve. And happily, though perhaps more arguably, the best thing about writer/director James Gunn's new Superman is David Corenswet, the 32-year-old tasked with breathing fresh life into this costumed crime fighter (and his alias Clark Kent) whom, by this point, we're all too familiar with.

If the sure-to-be-boffo global box office for Jurassic World Rebirth can be trusted, we real-life humans apparently haven't gotten close to bored with dinosaurs. Not all of us anyway.

Why F1: The Movie debuted on June 27 rather than over Father's Day weekend is frankly baffling, given that I can't remember the last time a film was so objectively, overwhelmingly, a Dad Movie

With 28 Years Later, we appear to be exiting the realm of realism and entering the land of the mythic, and I'm not sure that, inspiration-wise, trading George A, Romero for J.R.R. Tolkien is any kind of upgrade.

No one can singlehandedly revive the fading genre of the swoony big-screen romance. Yet with only two features under her belt to date, Celine Song is certainly giving it a good shot.

Originally presented by Francis Ford Coppola and hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a remarkable film event," director Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi enjoys a special June 25 screening as part of Rozz-Tox's community series Filmosofia, this evening in Rock Island also boasting a reading discussion on the movie's philosophical themes hosted by Augustana College's Dr. Deke Gould.

Although the movie isn't very funny until it begins hitting us with its really creative gory deaths, there was a moment not long into director Len Wiseman's Ballerina a continuation being helpfully marketed as From the World of John Wick: Ballerina that made me and others among our Thursday-afternoon crowd laugh out loud.

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