Mahershala Ali Archives | Deep Focus Review

Jurassic World Rebirth

Brian Eggert — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 23:28:48 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. Jurassic World Rebirth further proves that Steven Spielberg invented the visual language of modern blockbusters, and other filmmakers merely speak in it. Rather than create something new, director Gareth Edwards spends 134 minutes paying homage to Spielberg and his 1993 original, Jurassic Park. But more than just the masterful first film based on Michael Crichton’s book, or even its now-six sequels, Edwards also nods to Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in a recapitulation of iconic Hollywood imagery. No slouch himself, Edwards—the helmer of Monsters (2010), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), and The Creator (2023)—devises almost nothing new here. What seems new stems from recycled ideas that never really worked in the first place, such as genetically altered mutant dinosaurs. Rather than take the time to stretch his talent, Edwards falls back on the same reverence for Spielberg that directors Colin Trevorrow and J.A. Bayona displayed in Jurassic World (2015), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and Jurassic World Dominion (2022). And yet, even though Edwards’ visual nods to Spielberg and Rebirth‘s story autocannibalize the Jurassic series, it manages to be more purely entertaining than the last […]

The post Jurassic World Rebirth appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Alita: Battle Angel

Brian Eggert — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 23:41:41 +0000

Sitting down to write a positive review of Alita: Battle Angel, I cannot help but feel on the defensive. The critical community has panned this big-screen adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s manga series, and the few to respond positively have been lukewarm in their praise. Industry commentators and box-office analysts forecast major financial losses for distributor 20th Century Fox’s reportedly $200 million production, signaling that audiences aren’t altogether interested. Whatever such trends may say about Hollywood’s rampant, often misguided desire to create a long-running franchise similar to Harry Potter or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, these factors have little bearing on the film itself, which I enjoyed and at this point feel a need to defend. What I enjoyed about the film is the pageant of state-of-the-art CGI and imaginative world-building—it’s something to dazzle the eyes rather than engage the critical mind, and sometimes that sort of experience is worthwhile. However simplistic the characters and often banal the dialogue may be, Alita: Battle Angel offers an escapist science-fiction showpiece that may not be high art, but it nonetheless offers an important component of the moviegoing experience: spectacle. Working from a long-gestating script and production planning arranged by James Cameron, director Robert Rodriguez […]

The post Alita: Battle Angel appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Brian Eggert — Sun, 16 Dec 2018 22:50:29 +0000

After three Spider-Man franchises in sixteen years, audiences have every right to be wary about yet another Spider-Man origin story. Especially one that introduces not just one new Spider-Man but welcomes several alternates to the web-slinging Marvel superhero—all in a single movie about a multi-dimensional rift and the various wall-crawlers that team together to repair it. Fortunately, or maybe not depending on your perspective, Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse isn’t connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which Tom Holland plays Spider-Man alongside Iron Man and the other Avengers. Nor does the film exist in the same continuum as the previous Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield versions, nor Venom, the absurd spin-off released by Sony earlier this year. It’s not even live-action—it’s breathlessly animated in a style that is unlike anything audiences have seen before. Not being connected to previous entries actually works to this movie’s advantage, since there are enough varying parallel dimensions to keep track of in this movie alone without the need for trying to make sense of where it should be situated within the complicated franchise history. Against all odds, Into the Spider-Verse ends up being an inclusive, post-modern take on the Spider-Man mythos that, through energetic animation and […]

The post Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Green Book

Brian Eggert — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 23:19:26 +0000

Green Book pairs a tough Italian-American chauffeur with a Jamaican-born pianist from high society in a road movie that ventures into the pre-integration South of 1962. Based on a true story, the buddy comedy plays like a role reversal of Driving Miss Daisy (1989), except funnier and far less content with itself as lighthearted fare. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali star, their odd-couple characters clashing on issues of race and class to sometimes hilarious, sometimes sobering effect. And while it might be tempting to dwell on its director—Peter Farrelly, one half of the Farrelly brothers team that made Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There’s Something About Mary (1998)—to sell the movie’s humor and entertaining performances, there’s a streak of historical outrage exposed in this Universal release. The open racial intolerance depicted in the movie reflects a time not long ago when a well-educated, supremely talented, and wealthy person of color traveling through the South was subject to danger. If Green Book seems to naively behave as if such racism has disappeared, it at least offers a worthy message about the importance of having empathy for those outside of your immediate cultural sphere, regardless of their race, sexuality, or religion. Fresh […]

The post Green Book appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Hidden Figures

Brian Eggert — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 09:27:49 +0000

In 1962, NASA maintained a department of male engineers and mathematicians to crunch the numbers required for space travel. Their female counterparts checked their calculations, and within that subsection, an African-American group of so-called “colored computers” also worked for NASA. Hidden Figures tells the “based on true events” story of three Black women who worked for the U.S. space program, and how they made a difference for their race and gender. The film is a feel-good account of a civil rights and feminist victory, but it’s not so much a history lesson as a crowd-pleaser. Told in simplistic broad strokes designed for mass consumption in obvious ways, this is affecting and effortless entertainment with an important and timely message at its center—and what’s more, it features three talented performers at the center: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe. 20th Century Fox had purchased the rights to author Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book well before its 2016 publication. Allison Schroeder and Theodor Melfi adapted the material into an accessible screenplay, and Melfi (St. Vincent) directed the picture with a populist mindset. To be sure, it’s impossible not to be moved by or cheer for the victory of Henson’s character, […]

The post Hidden Figures appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Moonlight

Brian Eggert — Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:42 +0000

Barry Jenkins’ luminous and delicate Moonlight tells an expansive, intimate story about growing up poor, Black, and gay. To describe its protagonist, Chiron, by those labels would be reductive, however, as his character defies categorization, just as the film does. Based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jenkins assembles a life throughout three vignettes, three places in time, and three actors playing Chiron over the course of about fifteen years. Jenkins’ approach rolls in mesmerizingly poetic narrative waves and rich formal beauty, the effect delivered in measured scenes of painful experience. The graceful filmmaking on display surpasses the writer-director’s last film, his freshman effort Medicine for Melancholy back in 2008, while the deeply compassionate story leaves behind any thought of clichés or stereotypes in favor of something artful and fundamentally human. Cinema often tries to summarize the “African American experience” or “gay experience” into a single film, but Jenkins considers such matters of identity far too intricate to reduce down to a handful of broad tropes. Regardless of how society labels an individual, people evolve and continuously oppose classification in the nuanced details of their lives. Both Jenkins and McCraney grew up in […]

The post Moonlight appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Free State of Jones

Brian Eggert — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 00:00:49 +0000

A potentially sprawling historical drama is beset by an unfocused screenplay in Free State of Jones, the controversial true story of Newton Knight, a Confederate deserter who led a small band of renegades against Southern rule during the Civil War. Southerners still consider Knight one of their history’s great criminals, whereas the North views him as an early civil rights freedom fighter. Writer-director Gary Ross takes what might have been a significant, thrilling account of a forgotten chapter in American history and turns it into a didactic lesson, like a dramatically reenacted documentary. Real Civil War photographs appear onscreen as transitional devices, whereas titles explain the time and place after one of the film’s many leaps forward to advance the story, leaving the emotional draw inert. Ross keeps his audience at a distance for most of the picture with such storytelling mechanisms, never really delving into Knight as an individual—just his significance as an historical figurehead. In a role that recalls Matthew Broderick in Glory (1989), Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves (1990), and Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai (2003), Matthew McConaughey stars as Knight, a white man fighting for equal rights. It’s a performance that sends the McConaissance […]

The post Free State of Jones appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2

Brian Eggert — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 00:00:50 +0000

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” That lyric from The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” kept running through my head after The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, a stunning and decidedly grim finale to Suzanne Collins’ dystopian young adult series. Based on the third and final book in Collins’ trilogy, Mockingjay was broken into two films, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows-style. Part 1 concentrates on the way propaganda sways the masses on both sides of the fight between the Capitol, an evil empire, and the Rebellion, headed by an underground army. What comes as a shock is how the Hollywood adaptation has maintained many of the most controversial and un-commercial elements of the story, delivering a narrative with themes of terrorism, violence as entertainment, entertainment as propaganda, and altogether devoid of nationalistic heroes. Most of all, the film underscores how figureheads are just that, and our deeply felt human emotions are all that matter. Behind the camera on both Catching Fire and Mockingjay Part 1, director Francis Lawrence brings his strong, workmanlike craftsmanship to the aesthetic presentation. Lawrence, production designer Philip Messina, and cinematographer Jo Willems collaborate once more and again evoke scenes from the book […]

The post The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1

Brian Eggert — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:00:01 +0000

What’s true of both Suzanne Collins’ final novel in her Hunger Games trilogy and the first half of its film adaptation, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, is that they represent a different type of story than the first installments. Far removed from the thrilling dystopian survival tale in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, the third wades in politics, propaganda, and a call for revolution. Hopelessness and atrocity have ruined various districts. The troublesome yet adventurous games have been canceled. The spirit of rebellion spreads throughout the populace. Indeed, a dramatic shift in tone and manner consumes the narrative of Collins’ last book, the longest and best of the three. Its story could easily take up four hours of screen time, and so Summit Entertainment follows the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises by breaking the final chapter into two halves, with Mockingjay – Part 2 hitting theaters on November 25, 2015. As a result, there’s no denying that Mockingjay – Part 1 carries a sense of incompleteness as a feature film. As one might expect, it plays like one-half of a larger story and ends on a note so dour, that audiences may be turned off by the […]

The post The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 appeared first on Deep Focus Review.

Predators

Brian Eggert — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:00:49 +0000

As guilty a pleasure as they come, Predators proves to be an entertaining sci-fi actioner that’s capably directed and well-acted by an impressive ensemble. The story involves seemingly random humans being dropped onto a preserve for a race of alien hunters to pursue for sport. But the humans quickly learn they all have something in common; they’re all killers themselves, so they resolve to hunt the hunters. Directed by Armored and Vacancy helmer Nimrod Antal, this sequel derives its approach from James Cameron’s Aliens and increases the scope of the original Predator. The outcome innovates just enough to make the material feel like something new, even if the basic outline of the Arnold Schwarzenegger version is followed perhaps too closely. Twentieth Century Fox’s Predator franchise never quite took off the way the Alien franchise did. Following the Schwarzenegger hit, Danny Glover starred in Predator 2 and delivered a major disappointment, followed by two abysmally bad Alien vs. Predator flicks. And yet, the original remains a 1980s action classic. With these thoughts in mind, the filmmakers behind Predators have resolved to show their appreciation for the original by reminding us of how well Predator worked and still works, by not straying […]

The post Predators appeared first on Deep Focus Review.