Maybe it’s time to start thinking about the films that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay made together as an epic run of low-rent masterpieces, sort of like a legendary band that put out a string of five or six killer albums before breaking up. At least that’s what I found myself thinking when revisiting this; it was probably only my second viewing ever and I was a bit astonished by how truly great it is. As with “Talladega Nights,” both…

This is the kind of movie where the initial viewing is so unnervingly great, so exciting, that subsequent viewings can’t possibly live up. In fact, the bigger joy that a repeat viewing yields is the chance to show it to someone else for the first time—which is what I did, screening this in the basement for my family and some friends. Everyone was blown away by the audacity of it all; the deftness with which director Matt Johnson pulls off…

Way, way back in “Episode V," when Darth Vader revealed himself to Luke Skywalker as his father, it felt like an earthquake. Suddenly a deep, telling connection was revealed, and it totally changed the way we understood the story being told.

In J.J. Abrams’s monumentally stupid “Episode IX,” _everything_ is connected, everyone is related to everyone else, and it couldn't be less surprising, less impactful, because when everything is meant to be important, nothing is. Abrams has perverted the whole…

I'm so happy that Asian-American cinema is a legit real thing now, and that we have roles like these for Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. But I'm less happy about how pastiche cinema has become a substitute for genuine invention—I'm not sure I need another genre mashup exercise where the directors wear their influences as conspicuously on their sleeves as this. This movie doesn't even feel like sub-Tarantino fare to me; it's sub-Edgar Wright-ian, really, and that's not a…