With the TMNT reboot-sequel releasing soon, reviews are out and – shock – not appealing in the slightest. Here’s a look back at, low standards for the franchise kept close to the chest in this statement, what remains the best filmic adaptation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic/cartoon/media empire.
A pop-culture heavyweight in its day and still lurking in the mental wings of filmgoers of a certain age, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is more curio than feature film. Perhaps surprisingly though (a cringe-inducing accent or two aside) the film never threatens out-and-out embarrassment. The screenplay by Bob Herbeck and Todd Langen certainly is a wildfire spreading across the countryside, jerking around the general consensus of “four turtles battle metallic-suited abstract evil” about as abominably and arbitrarily as possible. But the insouciance of the picture allows it to slide, far more than any of the subsequent pictures in any incarnation of the franchise, into the free-wheeling, quasi-absurdist realm of animated television rather than feature-length cinema. Which, for a work called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is probably for the better compared to, say, a work like the 2014 reboot that tries to pretend it is an actual flesh-and-blood motion picture. Continue reading
Death Becomes Her
British indie darling Ben Wheatley has made a living for himself electro-shocking the ostensibly comatose world of cinematic death, parceling out and sowing the seeds of a strip of filmic land that is necrotic and cadaverous but never embalmed or lifeless. His films are death-marked but not deadened. Now on his fifth film, his masterpiece remains his 2011 effort Kill List, a modern reworking of the quintessential British horror film The Wicker Man. Until this point, that 1973 work has doubled as a sort of spiritual guiding light for Wheatley, who has by and large drawn himself to the lurking terrors in the pastoral rather than those which creep into the mental cogs and emotional rivets of automatized modern society. 
Relieving the film of the obvious comparison at the start, Captain America: Civil War is an unambiguous improvement over Zack Snyder’s lugubrious exercise in self-satisfaction Batman v Superman. But Civil War’s success on that front is almost exclusively a question of relatives rather than absolutes. It is not that Civil War meaningfully adopts a different track to success than Dawn of Justice (the amusingly wishful subtitle of Snyder’s film), so much as it is that Civil War simply repeats the failures of Dawn of Justice to a lesser extent. Both films valiantly extend the Nolanesque concern for ethical turmoil and vigilante justice, and they both ashamedly retreat into Nolan’s wheelhouse of erecting statuesque themes to double-down on their own self-importance only to explode those very questions in a hail of blockbuster-baiting bullets for the masses. Rather than barreling into the ethical crevices of their genres – ultimately expanding their potential – these two films ultimately reaffirm the essential limits of the genre they pine to knock down. A decade after Batman Begins, the superhero genre’s growing pains continue to do nothing but elide its essential immaturity. Rather than aging gracefully, the genre feels like a bunch of kids playing in their parents clothing. 
Shadow of a Doubt
Son of Saul
Cosmopolis
Sleeping Beauty
Oldboy
The Long Take 