Exclaim!

It’s forgivable to be a little cynical about Transformers in the year 2024. The franchise is seven films deep — eight if we include 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie — and most them aren’t great. Sure, they’ve made a lot of money, but at least one of the films in the series holds the dubious distinction of being…

Since so many countries were involved in World War II, people around the globe have stories of heroes committing acts of selfless gallantry for the greater good. Guy Ritchie’s latest, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, is one such film. In this story, a band of mostly British misfit heroes fight against the Axis powers on a…

Every year film festivals release a certain type of film — usually a drama starring an actor riding a wave of positive buzz (or established and trying to make a comeback), and they aim to tell a socially conscious and perhaps underseen story. These are, to use the vernacular, awards bait. These films tend…

Star Wars has had problems for a while now. The various Disney+ series have been a mixed bag, but one thing they all have in common is that, critically maligned or acclaimed, they all tend to start strong. The problem is that starting strong isn’t enough, and more than a few of the series have fumbled their endings. The other…

Multiverses are so hot right now. The idea of a limitless number of parallel dimensions, spinning off from every decision everyone makes, is a household idea and has been at the centre of several movies, such as Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, the animated Spider-Verse films and Everything Everywhere All at Once,…

As with any adaptation, Avatar walks a tricky line, seeking to please fans of the original material and appeal to new fans. Showrunner Albert Kim has publicly said that one of his goals was to broaden the appeal to an adult audience, citing Game of Thrones as an example of the tone he’d like to set — a…

… [T]he series contains many great performances and an excellent production design that make it worth watching. Everything from the costumes to the CG cityscapes feel as considered and authentic as possible, and for those of us who appreciate stage violence, this has its fair share. Shōgun is a good show — but it sometimes…

It’s fair to say that Disney+‘s various Star Wars shows have been a mixed bag. While the fan base remains rabid, the shows have not all been met with acclaim — some are critically loved (such as Andor), and others not so much (The Book of Boba Fett or Obi-Wan Kenobi).  What the best of them have in common is…

There’s a moment in the third act of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts where the bad guys have taken possession of the transwarp key (the central MacGuffin of the plot) and started their evil plan, and the good guys appear on the horizon to let everyone know that the big final battle is about to happen.…

The result is a series with unmet potential (at least in the first half) that will likely receive unfavourable comparisons to shows like Black Mirror or Westworld. That is not to say that the series is bad, though. The ideas raised are timely, and the show’s vision of the future is depressingly plausible. Fans of science fiction…

Polite Society hits the ground running, jumping and kicking in the first few minutes, and never lets up its pace or infectious, offbeat energy. It’s a mashup of genres and styles, ranging from a coming-of-age tale to a kung fu epic to an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist. Still, even with all this going on, director and writer Nida…

With so much content these days, it can sometimes feel like there are no new stories. Shrinking, AppleTV+’s new series starring Jason Segel, covers familiar territory: an affluent, white male therapist living in an affluent neighbourhood full of affluent friends has hit rock bottom after a year of grief and begins to act out as a…