4 Best Movies To Watch After Hocus Pocus 2 (2022)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Though their core plots aren’t similar, all three movies in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy share the common thread of emotionally immature men clinging to the relics of their youth, often to the detriment of their friendships and romantic lives. Specifically men of Generation X, who tend to glorify their younger days, and the pop culture associated with it, at a level that borders on delusional (and as a Gen X woman I can tell you we’re not much better about it). Continue Reading →
Strays
Talking animals have been an entertainment staple for practically as long as movies have been around. Most classics of the genre, like 1993’s Homeward Bound, aim squarely at children in the audience. Director Josh Greenbaum’s Strays seeks to subvert that approach by weaving dirty jokes and curse words into familiar genre tropes. The result is considerably more grating and unpleasant to watch. Continue Reading →
Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
It takes almost an hour for Patrick Hughes’ The Hitman’s Wife's Bodyguard to take a break. At around the 52-minute mark, the film goes without dialogue, gunshots/explosions, or a car chase. But this short-lived, relatively still moment lasts less than a minute. Like a person terrified of an awkward silence who just keeps talking and talking to fill the void, Hughes does not let the movie ever take a second to breathe. Continue Reading →
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
Oz Perkins' latest, unceremoniously dumped into January, is a revisionist Grimm story as atmospheric as it is thin. The original fairy tales documented by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were often bloody, dark stories. As time passed, and we decided that children were too fragile for the originals, we reshaped them into toothless Disney stories of romance and happy endings. And as society began to critique the passive nature of these saccharine protagonists, the 2010s gave us badass butt-kicking makeovers for our heroes, like Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. At the dawn of the century’s third decade, however, we see fairy tales leaning harder into their older, more folkloric elements, crafting stories that mine terror out of feeling decidedly old and out-of-step with our understanding of the world. It happened with The Witch, and now we’ve got Gretel & Hansel, directed by Oz Perkins (son of Anthony), which opts for an eerie atmosphere and a decidedly dark interpretation of its source material. The movie opens with one fairy tale framing another: Gretel’s favorite childhood story of a young child, beset by illness in their infancy. In a desperate bid to save the child’s life, her father takes her to a local witch. While the witch saves her life, she also gives the child the power of prophecy and witchcraft. As the child grows, so does her power and evil, until the townsfolk have little choice but to exile her to the woods. Continue Reading →