Mark McPherson's Blog, page 3

“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” Review

The Fantastic Four hasn’t had the best track record with movies, but the fourth time (or fifth if you count the unreleased Roger Corman film) is the charm. First Steps understands that the best way to make this superhero ensemble work lies more in them being a family unit rather than how much funny stuff can be done with a man who can stretch his limbs and a woman who can turn invisible. And rather than run away from the 1960s era that spawned them, this film zips back to the past for a retro-fu...

“Sorry, Baby” Review

As the directorial debut of , Sorry, Baby effortlessly navigates the minefield of staging a dramedy around rape and power dynamics. Terrible things happen to the unfortunate Agnes (played by Victor), trying to find something worth living for as a literature professor at her New England college. But she finds a way to keep going on and maybe find the better parts of life, akin to how she instructs a class on a reading of Lolita. The students dart from the disgust of the central topic to...

“I Know What You Did Last Summer” (2025) Review

“Nostalgia is overrated,” states the returning Jennifer Love Hewitt during the climax. I agree with her, but I don’t think this clumsy legacy sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer shares that same sentiment. While horror franchises like Scream and Final Destination have found clever ways to return from the dead, this saga stumbles like a decaying zombie that should’ve stayed in its grave. The original film was little more than a dumb teenage slasher, and this continuation offers even less th...

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” Review

There’s a quiet absurdity to how death and trauma are treated in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. As the film begins, Uncle Fred is dead. He doesn’t die surrounded by his family in a hospital bed or from an unfortunate murder. He collapses dead in the street outside a brothel, discovered by his niece Shula (), dressed in a Missy Elliot costume from a party. There’s a numbness felt for both the discovery and the funeral to follow, where even the dark discoveries of Uncle Fred are met with m...

“Superman” (2025) Review

While James Gunn’s work on recent DC Comics projects like The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker was loaded with a refreshing divergence of misfit anti-heroes, they still had heart. Gunn’s take on Superman reveals that the heart is still beating strong and can carry over into A-listers. He doesn’t try to recreate what Richard Donner had perfected, nor does he aim to go subversively grimy as with Zack Snyder. Gunn has crafted his own Superman ripped from his favorite pages and spun from his own hallmar...

“Heads of State” Review

and showcased great comedic chemistry in The Suicide Squad, and some of that energy carries into Heads of State, a good-but-not-great action vehicle. The duo is tossed into a buddy comedy where they play key political figures caught in a terrorist plot, built more for explosive chases and fight scenes than anything that is politically compelling. It’s all very fine, but much like accomplished action director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry, Nobody), you know this pair can do...

“Jurassic World Rebirth” Review

Jurassic World Rebirth shares less in common with Jurassic Park and more DNA with the Godzilla movies, with intoxicating monsters and uninteresting humans. Part of the charm that kept me watching Jurassic Park so many times on VHS when I was younger was that there were some quotable moments before the bigger scenes of a T-rex terrorizing cars and eating lawyers right off the toilet. Had I watched Rebirth on VHS, I’d likely be giving the fast-forward button a workout.

Much like Gareth Edwards’...

“M3GAN 2.0” Review

The sequel to the tongue-in-cheek sci-fi/horror M3GAN feels less like an expansion of the story and more of a stress test for the titular terror. The acid-spitting killer AI of a little girl returns to take more of a central role in a Terminator 2 style tale of her being an unlikely ally against a more brutal AI. Although M3GAN is the most capable of hunting down a new robotic rogue, there’s a lot of weight placed on her shoulders with how she’s expected to carry a film of ho-hum ideas amid ha-h...

“28 Years Later” Review

While it hasn’t technically been 28 years since Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, the director returns to his zombie film with new ideas alongside familiar screenwriter Alex Garland. The two of them have grown as filmmakers who reprising their zombie roots should find something more than a new assortment of the decaying undead and the many ways to gore them. While they do take a surprisingly mature and thoughtful approach to the nature of growing up and dying, Boyle hasn’t skimped on the breakneck te...

“Elio” Review

Pixar’s latest sci-fi adventure, Elio, can best be described as a surprisingly mature iteration of The Last Starfighter. While the story might be a similar tale of a youngster getting his intergalactic wish come true, there’s more thought placed into the perceptions of our universe beyond that whiz-bang excitement of space wars. Here is a film that has heart and hope that there’s more beyond the stars than mere monsters that eat us or pint-sized puppets who innocently eat our candy. It’s an anim...