May 18
Directed by Scott Sanders, Black Dynamite is a Blaxploitation homage flick that nails it down and knocks it out. Where some attempts at the genre fail, like the hopelessly mediocre Father’s Day, Black Dynamite excels because of one critical thing: commitment.
Ah, the mighty apex of Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman series of films. Batman & Robin is a flick that is almost universally reviled among Bat-fans, those dark denizens of comic book mischief. Some might say that the revulsion over Schumacher’s colourful, homoerotic, innuendo-laced tale of woe and latex is well-placed, but – holy campfest, Batman! – I actually kind of like this movie.
When Guy Ritchie uncorked the bottle on Sherlock Holmes in the form of a 2009 blockbuster, I was surprised at how fun the whole shebang was. The sequel, released in December of 2011, attempts to capture the same energy and amusement but the pacing is off and the plot is beyond convoluted. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is, as a result, a messy bore of a detective film.
Contraband, directed by Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur, is about as uneven a heist picture as I’ve ever seen. It is an unwieldy film that feels like it could work were it simplified and given a style injection. It is a detail-oriented picture, one that runs countless tangents and seems particularly bogged down in technical minutiae about this job or that job.
The Batman film series started by Tim Burton swings in a different direction with Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever. According to reports, Warner Bros. was annoyed that Batman Returns was “too scary” and thusly alienated a potential goldmine of a target audience by sending kids screaming from the theatres in droves. The idea was to bring the demographic back in theatres – and what better way to carry out the feat than homoeroticism and nauseating colour schemes.
