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Bad Boys: Ride or Die Review by BMC

Directed by the returning directing team Adil Bilall, this latest entry in Jerry Bruckheimer’s high-octane action-comedy series, starting nearly 30 years ago, delivers the goods. At one point in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, one of the leads exclaims: ‘This is some dysfunctional shit!’ With that kind of meta arthouse commentary, who needs critics? Not that reviews will matter to the genuine affection of viewers for the action-comedy buddy cop series that started three decades ago and whose lineage goes deep into 1974 (Freebie and the Bean and Busting; cite the others, if you want). It’s a format that works, even if this fourth entry is a little stretched. Seeing Will Smith’s Mike and Martin Lawrence’s Marcus go through their trademark bickering routines is like spending an evening with a long-married couple whose constant jibes have got downright boring. At the beginning, when Mike calls Marcus a junk-food junkie, you think: Not again. His worry is disturbingly prescient, as only a few months...
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Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes Movie Review

Story: One day after Caesar, an adolescent ape will strike out on a path that will lead him to refine his notion of a distant past – and reshape the future of both apes and humans. Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), directed by Wes Ball, deposes the veneration of the character Caesar and announced that his titanic story was complete. In its place, the film forces us empathise with Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee who survives a horrific attack on his village. A quest for vengeance and meaning leads Noa down a path that tells us more about his species’ controversial relationship with humans and its ruler’s taxation without representation – the fascistic Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Noa is joined in his journey by Mae (Freya Allan), a human girl beholden to a plot device with unexplored gravity; Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan whose name signifies Caesar’s lost ideals of nobility in a new age of ape dominance; and Kaya (Laura Harrier), a gorilla who doesn’t believ...
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Black Dog Movie Review

The top prize went to Dark Cloud by director Guan Hu (The Eight Hundred, Mr Six); a darkly comic thriller about a taxi driver and released convict entangled in underworld politics, and starring the Canadian-Taiwanese actor Eddie Peng. Chinese director Guan Hu’s stylish new feature Black Dog opens in familiar mode: a former convict named Lang (Eddie Peng) has spent a decade in jail. Now, upon his release, he is attempting to re-enter normal life in his native, tiny city on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in Northwest China. But some old devils rear their heads. If you expect the story to resemble any number of prefab B-movies – or even the scenario of the Sylvester Stallone miniseries Tulsa King (2022) – you need to be told that Black Dog is, quite simply, not that kind of film. For one thing, who is the titular black dog? In any case, it’s not the total loser of a protagonist – a man who rarely speaks more than a few words of dialogue to any person throughout the entire film (including ...
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Summer Camp Movie Review

Shot at a boomers reunion, it is another outing for writer-director Castille Landon, with Eugene Levy and Dennis Haysbert also starring. Should Hollywood want to lure older people – who have been among the most faithful friends of cinema and who patronise less than their younger counterparts these days – back to the multiplex by redoubling its attentions on the over-50 set, here’s a cipher – from the so-so to the seriously, erratically so-bad – as to what works (they cast Eugene Levy!), and more importantly, what most assuredly does not – efforts at wacky disorientation saturated in enforced thinness. Zipping here and there between strained slapstick and thoughtfully scripted tête-à-têtes, this boomer-centric reunion comedy finds a well-meaning and capable cast of septuagenarian professionals – Alan Arkin, Christopher Lloyd, Kenan Thompson, Sally Field – stranded in a mostly laugh-free zone of zip lines and trite setups. Summer Camp THE BOTTOM LINE Reunions should be more memorable tha...
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Young Woman and the Sea Movie Review

Courtesy the Art Institute of ChicagoThe ’Star Wars’ and ‘Magpie’ actress in Joachim Ronning’s portrait of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. She adored the water: ‘To me the sea is like a person. A child I’ve known a long time,’ she once told reporters. ‘I never feel lonely when I’m out there.’ This unflagging determination fueled by that comfortable feeling of being at home in the water got this young German American swimmer (portrayed here by Daisy Ridley) within steps of the English Channel record despite a storm that churned up the channel and sexist notions that female swimmers were inherently less capable. When Ederle completed it in 14 hours and 31 minutes in 1926, she not only broke a world record (held by a man), she was widely credited with changing minds about the nature of female athletes. When she returned to New York, crowds threw her a parade on a scale the city had never seen before (or since). She was cheered home as ‘the Queen of the Waves’...
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Spaceman Movie Review By BigMoviesCinema

Spaceman (3 / 5) In director Johan Renck’s Spaceman, early on, a small girl asks Adam Sandler’s astronaut Jakub whether. Can I ask you a question?’ There is a pause. ‘Can I ask something?’ Sandler hesitates again. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘But probably not the question you want to ask.’ ‘OK,’ she says. ‘If you are the loneliest man on the planet, will you come back?’ Sandler tosses his head to the side: I… I am not alone.’ She smiles. ‘Then you’re not lonely.’ ‘No, I’ll be back in a few weeks,’ Sandler tells her. ‘And to my family.’ The hesitation in the astronaut’s reply undermines what he’s saying. Jakub is heading out to Jupiter to find out where Chopra’s particles come from. He’s light years from home. His pregnant wife, Lenka, played by Carey Mulligan, is looking forward to the day he returns, just as much as he is checking the clock down to these minutes. Director: Johan Renck Cast: Adam Sandler, Paul Dano, Carey Mulligan, Isabella Rossellini, Kunal Nayyar It does not take long for Renck...
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The Gentlemen Series Review By BigMoviesCinema

The Gentlemen (3 / 5) In the end, his spin-off series is an enormous success. A bit too long-winded for its own good in places and too glossy for its liking, especially in its deployment of tropes, but on the whole, its clown car of characters (attached to a wealthy aristocratic family/estate in transition) would hold your attention. Guy Ritchie’s penchant for eccentricity, the oddball and the outright darkly comic is on full display, and if the filmmaking is rarely less than spot-on, few filmmakers can make a joke quite as successfully. (Were it not for Lock, Stock and Snatch, one would be listening to me say Snatch, Lock, and Stock) The spin-off would have been a miniseries with half the running time and more careful distribution of attention to the comic or enigmatic characters, as the case may be. But the lingering production remainders of those early films (such as Mad Mel’s mercenary mayhem) is unavoidable. Creator – Guy Ritchie Cast – Theo James, Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Ings, Gi...
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