Category Archives: Action

Creed III review — Eye of the Tiger, baby!

March 7, 2023 flawintheiris

Directed by Michael B. Jordan | Written by Keenan Coogler, Zach Baylin, and Ryan Coogler | 116 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Amazon Prime It's been almost 50 years, with Six Rocky movies and now three Creed movies. This is a pugilistic franchise with a remarkable cinematic lifespan. The way it pivoted to this spin-off was…Read More

Revisiting Creed and Creed II in advance of Creed III

February 28, 2023 flawintheiris

The third edition of the Creed movies, itself a spin-off of the Rocky franchise, arrives later this week directed by lead actor Michael B. Jordan. I thought this week would be a good time to have a look back at my thoughts on the first two films. (For reviews of the other Rocky pictures, go…Read More

Avatar: The Way of Water review — Spectacular and stupid

December 22, 2022 flawintheiris

Directed by James Cameron | Written by Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman, and Shane Salerno | 192 min | ▲▲△△△ Rewatching the original Avatar last week I was reminded of Jim Cameron's incredible ambition, impressive technical wizardry, and cluelessness when it comes to reading the room, culturally speaking. The dude understands allegory and…Read More

New Christmas Movies chat on the CBC

December 21, 2022 flawintheiris

If you're a regular FITI reader you may have noticed I've been watching more than my fair share of Christmas movies this season, especially the new batch showing up in cinemas and on streaming services. https://halifaxbloggers.ca/holiday-movies/ I was on CBC Information Morning this week discussing a few of these Christmas movies with host Portia…Read More

RRR review — The year’s best superhero movie, and more

December 19, 2022 flawintheiris

Directed by SS Rajamouli | Written by Rajamouli, Vijayendra Prasad, and Sai Madhav Burra | 187 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Netflix Apparently based on the lives of actual freedom fighters in pre-independence India, it's fair to say this picture has a delightfully loose relationship with historical accuracy — as well as physics. RRR is a…Read More

Top 10 New-To-Me Movies of 2022

December 18, 2022 flawintheiris

A few days ago on the hellscape we all know as Twitter, someone posted a list of the older films they'd discovered this year. Movies from the past they'd never had a chance to see before but had sought out or stumbled upon in the past 12 months and were glad they did. Since I'm…Read More

Avatar (2009) review — Some good, a lot bad in box office giant

December 15, 2022 flawintheiris

Written and Directed by James Cameron | 162 min | ▲▲△△△ | Disney + Having not seen Avatar since the week it opened in cinemas in 2009, I figured it was important to revisit the world-conquering cultural phenomenon before I bought a ticket for the much delayed sequel opening today. In my memory the largely…Read More

Violent Night review — “Like Die Hard, except a Christmas movie”

December 7, 2022 flawintheiris

Directed by Tommy Wirkola | Written by Pat Casey and Josh Miller | 112 min | ▲▲△△△ | Crave Violent Night is one of the most shoddily made movies I've seen in a long time, a picture so half-baked it's amazing the filmmakers had the nerve to do it. They should count their lucky stars…Read More

Enola Holmes 2 review — Fun times in teen detective sequel

November 12, 2022 flawintheiris

Directed by Harry Bradbeer | Written by Bradbeer and Jack Thorne, based on the series of books by Nancy Springer | 129 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Netflix It's a welcome return of Millie Bobby Brown as Enola Holmes, Sherlock Holmes' non-canonical younger sister, who made quite a splash with her first appearance in a Netlfix…Read More

Bullet Train review — Action comedy goes off the rails

August 15, 2022 flawintheiris

Directed by David Leitch | Written by Zak Olkewicz, from a novel by Kôtarô Isaka | 127 min | ▲▲△△△ | Amazon Prime Back in the 1990s, the success of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction spawned a collection of "Tarantino-esque" gangster pictures with titles like Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead,…Read More