Year: 2018

The spy film ‘Red Sparrow’ flies in some twisty, some meandering directions

Jeff Mitchell

“Red Sparrow” – After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many Western Europeans and Americans – hoped for a less adversarial relationship with their/our former communist foe, Russia.  Sure, Russia technically is a democracy, but a sketchy one, and after recent shenanigans in 2016, this aforementioned “former-enemy” certainly is not behaving like a nation wanting to cozy up as best friends with the West.  Far from it. As Bob Dylan preached in his 1964 song “With God on Our Side”: “I’ve learned to…

‘Annihilation’ horrifically demolishes old boundaries

Jeff Mitchell

“Annihilation” – Nobody. Nobody comes back. Nobody comes back after entering The Shimmer. Actually one person does come back, and now, Lena (Natalie Portman), a doctor – who also spent seven years in the United States Army – feels compelled to enter it.  In doing so, she takes movie audiences on a sometimes beautiful, but mostly a deeply unsettling, nightmarish journey in writer/director Alex Garland’s (“Ex Machina” (2014)) visionary science fiction stunner. The Shimmer is a bizarre phenomenon, a growing permeable force field, created by a meteor that landed near an…

‘Black Panther’ cinematically and culturally advances the Marvel Universe

Jeff Mitchell

“Black Panther” – “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” – Dorothy (Judy Garland), “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) Well, if Dorothy sat down and watched the latest Marvel installment, “Black Panther”, she would exclaim that Oz could not hold a candle to Wakanda, and Kansas has become a very distant memory. Over the last 10 years, Marvel Studios has expanded wonder and broadened sci-fi horizons for comic book-movie audiences everywhere, especially with “Guardians of the Galaxy” (2014) and “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017).  These stories, however, were seeded…