Bad Movies Archives - Vanyaland

‘Wicked: For Good’ Review: It isn’t easy being green

Nick Johnston — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 15:08:18 +0000

A year and a few hundred million dollars later, John M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked, itself an adaptation of the Gregory Maguire novel of the same name, which in turn was a revisionist reinterpretation of characters from The Wizard of Oz (both L. Frank Baum’s children’s fable and the 1939 movie), has come to its curtain call. Somehow, it’s even more culturally omnipresent than it was last time around — brand collabs, tie-in merchandise, (apparently decent-tasting) Skittles […]

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‘Tron: Ares’ Review: A digital wasteland

Nick Johnston — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 15:05:48 +0000

Try as they might, Disney’s never been able to recreate the secret sauce that made Tron so appetizing to a generation of nerdy kids at the start of the PC era. Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy came close in spirit and style, but it was missing that certain je ne sais quoi that relegated it to the status of “cult film” rather than the next-generation tentpole franchise that the pre-Marvel, pre-Lucasfilm, pre-Fox Disney was so desperately hoping for. Joachim Ronning’s Tron: […]

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‘A House of Dynamite’ Review: Bigelow’s latest never goes critical

Nick Johnston — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 16:37:03 +0000

Few things would surprise me less than Netflix dropping a three-hour, three-episode extended cut of Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite. It’s already episodic by design – in essence, you get to watch the US Government try to stop an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), fired from somewhere in the Pacific, before it hits Chicago, and once that fails, decide whether or not to retaliate. All that drama takes place over the course of eighteen minutes, and we follow the action […]

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‘Eddington’ Review: Ari Aster’s grand 2020 statement says little

Nick Johnston — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 18:19:16 +0000

Ari Aster has a Multiplicity problem. It’s not that he makes movies about the same subject – a protagonist’s powerlessness to escape the fate that a conspiracy of their family or peers has planned for them — as plenty of filmmakers spend entire careers exploring a particular theme. No, it’s that, if you ignore his short format work, Hereditary was his Michael Keaton, the template from which all his other works derive their structure, and he his funding for further […]

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‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’ Review: Tyrannosaurus wrecks

Nick Johnston — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 18:09:23 +0000

There’s a specific story about Jurassic Park that gets re-upped every few years when Universal sees the dormant intellectual property’s crop is ready for harvest, fires up the threshing machine to reap, and the content mill gleaners of the fields emerge from their Watership Down-like hovels to steal what bits of leftover grain fall to the wayside. It goes something like this: Steven Spielberg outbid a host of suitors for the rights to Michael Crichton’s novel – Tim Burton, Joe […]

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‘Death of a Unicorn’ Review: Gallop away from this one

Nick Johnston — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 15:52:05 +0000

Alex Scharfman’s Death of a Unicorn seemingly only exists to terrify little children mortally as they walk with their parents to whatever theater in the multiplex is showing Dog Man – an arresting sight to the seven-year-old eye, one that will open up a bevy of complex and ugly questions on the ride home about mortality and that Goldfish Farm Upstate that little Flipper made his way to last year. If a unicorn can die, so can a fish, and […]

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‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Review: A ‘Winter Soldier’ re-run

Nick Johnston — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:52:23 +0000

Kevin Feige’s spent the last few years immersed in nostalgia — that’s what lies at the heart of the MCU’s “Multiverse Saga,” but starting off the post-Endgame phase with Black Widow should have signaled which way the winds were blowing even before Kang the Conquerer came and went — and it’s understandable why. Most of his attempts to move the cinematic universe into a new era haven’t been particularly good or well-received (Eternals), and the ones that have proven to […]

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‘Wolf Man’ Review: Rough, rough

Nick Johnston — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:50:06 +0000

Our cultural fascination with ‘00s nostalgia continues to manifest itself in strange ways. Sure, you already know that Gen Z kids have reclaimed Oakleys and baggy-ass camo pants, and all of your favorite sitcoms from that era are getting one-and-done streaming revivals – that’s all pretty obvious. Yet now it’s come for horror, with a retro-styled ethos masquerading as “elevated” once again beginning to inform big productions. That guiding light is, in fact, shame: There are certain horror films that, […]

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‘Red One’ Review: This is one expensive Prime commercial

Nick Johnston — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 18:39:39 +0000

Christmas movies are in a particularly weird place at the moment: There’s never been so much demand for the genre – so much so that multiple television channels devote themselves to it throughout December on a 24/7 basis, and every streaming service and major cable network has a seemingly endless supply of premieres each year (Hell, Hallmark owns the small towns they film their Lori Loughlin rom-coms in) – but the multiplex has proven to be a surprisingly hard nut […]

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‘Saturday Night’ Review: Grab the remote, change the channel

Nick Johnston — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 10:03:03 +0000

Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, and today we’re re-publishing it with the film’s wider release. Check out our extensive review slate of TIFF 2024, and revisit our official preview and complete archives of prior editions. Out of all the people to valorize at our current moment, it was a strange choice on Jason Reitman’s part to make a hagiographic paeon to Lorne Michaels’ visionary skills as a producer. He’s our window to the […]

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