Nate Zoebl is an avid film lover since he was yea-high to whatever people are yea-high to. He's written film reviews since he was 17 years old and is a proud member of the Central Ohio Film Critics Association (COFCA). He is an active screenwriter, educator, filmmaker with the award-winning group Edwin J. Hill, one-time playwright ("Our Town... Attacked by Zombies"), lover of bad movies thanks to a childhood fed by the likes of MST3K, perhaps the world's foremost scholar on the movies of Dr. Uwe Boll, and sometimes collection of coherent molecules.
A better movie was within reach, which makes it all the sadder that Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is reluctantly the movie we get, a visual spectacle that bores as it overwhelms.
Reeves, serving as co-writer once more with Mark Bomback, brings the franchise to its natural and thrilling conclusion. War for the Planet of the Apes is a blockbuster with soul.
Spider-Man: Homecoming announces itself as a brash, exhilarating, hilarious, and amazingly assured film that immediately lines up with the upper tier of the MCU.
Transformers: The Last Knight is exactly what the detractors have railed against from the start: a cacophonous ejaculation of incomprehensible nonsense.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is a definite improvement over its waterlogged 2011 predecessor, but I can’t help feeling like the magic of this franchise has been squelched.
If I do not see a more headache-inducing, self-indulgent, cumbersome, illogical, and generally exasperating movie this summer, I will consider myself most fortunate.