As Tom Petty said it best, the waiting is the hardest part. Just ask fans of the D.C. Universe, who expected to see Wonder Woman 1984 in December 2019 and have endured a year’s worth of overoptimistic postponements. After watching their proposed dates of June 5, Aug. 14 and Oct. 2 devoured by the pandemic, Warner Brothers took the industry-upending move of dropping the film as … [Read more...]
‘Wrinkle in Time’: Hokey, clunky, but its heart is in the right place
Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time is the first $100 million feature to be directed by a woman of color. This is a big deal for the news chyrons and for DuVernay’s rising clout in an industry dominated by white males. But headlines about budgets and box-office returns give us critics the blues, because they rarely have anything to do with the art and politics of cinema. For … [Read more...]
‘Wonder Woman’: An honest-to-gods feminist superhero
The superhero origin story is the most durably familiar of the comic-book tent pole narratives. Even the best ones spin off the same formula: The naïve title character discovers her powers, trains exhaustively, learns the power-hungry ways of mortals, and grows virtually indestructible until she finally meets her match against an arch-villain bent on world domination. The final … [Read more...]