Jokes, we all love ‘em! They make us laugh, they make us think, on certain days they can be exchanged for candy, but as every self important comedian will tell you if you're trapped in a conversation with them, jokes can be a vehicle for scathing social criticism in deft hands. In, uh, slightly less deft hands, however, sometimes the best you can hope for is comedy that boils down to an unironic iteration of “We live in a society.” Now despite having the word joke in the title, Todd Philips’...

Ghosts. Surely the most logistically puzzling of supernatural fiends, the mechanics of ghosts, their creation and destruction, and their predilection for mostly just knocking stuff off tables or opening and closing doors in grainy camcorder footage are all questions people have asked about our phantasmic friends, but answers remain sparse. Fortunately, when you’re making a movie you can just make stuff up and authenticate it through the fact that you’re telling a fictional story and therefore...

Avatar was made in 2009 by perennially smug not-eur James Cameron and we’re reviewing it. Yay. Contact us/Requests/Questions: [email protected] Donate: https://paypal.me/magellensmovies?country.x=US&locale.x=en_US Check out our blog for more reviews and movie content!!! https://magellansatthemoviesblog.blogspot.com/

Family. Probably best known for sponsoring the Fast and the Furious movies, family is an important part of many global cultures, so it’s no surprise that it’s an important part of many movies. From the Sawyers to the Parrs, movies are constantly centering groups of people related by blood and bound to each other by love to the delight of audiences everywhere. Of course, family isn’t always chainsaws and superpowers, sometimes it can be a touchy subject for people. That’s why we have movies...

There’s a reason so many of our most reviled and infamous villains are clowns. The Joker, that one Final Fantasy antagonist, Krusty the Klown, and many other dastardly jesters that plot world mass murder, world domination, or subpar jokes have terrified audiences for years thanks to the simple fact that a man in chalk white makeup embellished by garish reds and greens and a hideous grin is far more likely to give you nightmares than make you laugh. This enduring truth of Villain Design 101 is...

Teenagers. Normally, they're the last demographic you'd want to arm with deadly weapons and a thorough knowledge of martial arts, what with their unstable hormones and abysmal decision making. Now hold on a minute, Boomer, I hear you say. What if the teenagers in question weren't just young folks from the ages of thirteen to nineteen, but a group of mutant turtles age thirteen to nineteen? Why my dear hypothetical reader, in that case I would purchase their weapons myself because then we...

How come we don’t hear that much about serial killers these days? I like to think it’s because the global spirit of human brotherhood has just grown too powerful for even the most depraved of violent urges to be fulfilled. Either that or the advancement of forensic technology coupled with a host of societal and cultural factors has made serial murder both less appealing and the prospect of success less viable. Whatever the cause, serial killers have become increasingly rare, but there was a...

Aliens! They may have already visited our home in the solar system, but if so, then they seem to have mainly come here for tourist reasons and to appear in grainy footage shot by air force pilots and people who don’t have anything better to do than point active cameras at the sky in the middle of the night. Whatever the truth of the various historical and modern UAP sightings may be, the fact is that people have been fascinated by hypothetical encounters between man and E.T. for centuries,...

If war is hell, then I suppose it makes some ironic sense that filming a movie about war would be hellish, too. In case you hadn’t heard, wars are messy, noisy, dangerous things for all involved and recreating them can be tricky as well, especially if you’re a slightly eccentric perfectionist director deep in the jungles of Asia trying to make a movie about one of the most chaotic and unpopular wars in American history. Such was the mission of Francis Ford Coppola in his legendary Vietnam...

Ah the halcyon days of the 2010s. The era when video games began emerging as the cultural powerhouse they have evolved into, the world was recovering from the Great Recovery, and Covid-19 was just a glint in virology’s eye. It was also a time of movies, and lots of them. Good movies, bad movies, and everything in between. Marvel movies got their start, and with their ascent came the great (and short lived) comic book movie war, followed by the meteoric rise of the cinematic universe as an...

Japan has given us many amazing things: body pillows of questionably aged characters, plumbers who seem to do stunningly small amounts of plumbing, and the best method to find out which of your friends sing best when they are drunk. But all those things have nothing to do with cinema, of which Japan's greatest contribution is arguably Akira Kurosawa. This legendary director influenced much of American cinema with his films from the 60s, including one certain franchise about prolonged...

It’s hardly revolutionary to say that the superhero genre is on the decline these days. In terms of both review scores and box office returns, movies featuring men and women in brightly colored outfits throwing CGI monsters through CGI cityscapes with the aid of their CGI powers have become little more than fodder for less than favorable memes and a literally endless stream of articles with titles like “Is This the End of the Comic Book Movie?”, “Is This the end of the MCU?”, “Have...

Ah, snobbery. It’s so often a mask for the discouraged, the downtrodden, the defeated. To puff yourself up over some esoteric details only you and five other people know about is to appear large and confident when we are in fact small and meek. But enough about me, let’s talk about Sideways, a 2004 drama based on the book by Rex Pickett. Sideways centers on that rarest of snobs: wine snobs, but slowly unfolds into a deeply moving character study of a struggling middle-aged writer and...

When you get knocked down, you simply must get back up again. Surely one of the most worn of all the many self-help cliches, basically just keep on keeping on for the less earthy among us. Still, sometimes a classic is just what the doctor ordered, and for a dejected and apathetic Bruce Wayne who’s lost his kind of girlfriend and his kind of work friend to a nihilistic mass murdering clown, doctor’s orders are really the kind of things you want to be following. Thus, the stage is set for the...

Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be a super genius. While some synaptically blessed individuals carve their names into the face of history with their achievements in advanced particle physics and beating all of the Dark Souls games without getting hit, the best us dumb losers can hope for is third place at Dusty Steve’s general trivia night. Thankfully, movies allow us to live vicariously through onscreen characters who possess far greater acuity than ourselves. And if you’re feeling...

Do you miss your dead wife? Are you worried about your young son finding his own way in the apocalypse? Do you find the drudgery of the daily struggle for survival is just getting you down? Then you, my friend, are in need of a genuine, rejuvenating, individualized Cormac McCarthy road trip! On our world famous route through the blasted remains of North America you’ll be treated to only the most traumatizing of close encounters with filthy cannibals and dine on the finest of radioactive dust!...

When you’ve just lost a war, the last thing you need is a giant radioactive dinosaur with fire breath taking a self-guided tour of your remaining cities. Unfortunately, such is the plight of the people of Japan who, as we all know from high school history class, have been under siege from kaijus of all shapes and sizes since the end of World War II. The most famous of these immense invaders, of course, being Godzilla, one of the most recognizable monsters of movie history and one whose...

For as long as there has been television, there has been The Simpsons. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but not by much, since The Simpsons aired a full two years before the Soviet Union was dissolved. This legend of prime-time TV took the world by storm when everyone was first introduced to its titular family of corn-colored stereotypes, and while the painful collapse in its quality since then is a saga of deterioration worthy of Edward Gibbon, for about ten years The Simpsons reigned supreme....

Love. It, ah . . . it’s all warm and fuzzy? Look, we’ve done like four movies about love now, I’m fresh out of ways to say that love is a multi-faceted, complicated aspect of the human experience. Hollywood, however, is emphatically not out of things to say about love, or at least they think there’s still new ground to be broken on the subject. That’s why one hundred and thirty-four years after the first motion picture was made Park Chan-wook decided to make himself a romance in the form of...

Well, folks, we’ve made it. Magellans at the Movies has hit the big one-oh-oh. Over the course of the last two years we’ve told you about our tastes in directors and TV shows, we’ve established hilarious jokes and classic catchphrases like “Would you listen to it casually?” and “Life is hard and full of disappointments”, but the bulk of our time spent in cyberspace has been dedicated to reviewing a full ninety movies for your listening pleasure. We hope you’ve enjoyed your time with us; maybe...

Why can’t we all just get along? It’s a question that’s hounded human civilization since the moment a guy eating pizza crust-first, a guy eating pizza from the edge inwards, and a third guy starting at the point of the slice and working his way north all shared a meal with each other and realized that the term “civilization” is subject to audience interpretation. The obvious answer, of course, is that human beings are simply too tribal and their cultural differences too intractable for the...

I have no breezy, jokey description for this one. Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List is a devastating film about overwhelming darkness and a single bruised, weary speck of light in the midst of the seemingly endless shadows. Please watch it if you haven’t. Contact us/Requests/Questions: [email protected]

Ladies and gentlemen, there are moments in life when it comes time to face the music. Old wrongs that must eventually be answered for, debts that must be repaid, orangutans that must be returned to their home rain forests after a brief but disastrous stint as your exotic pet. What I’m saying is that we all make bad choices and eventually the bill for those errors comes due, but we can be thankful that, for most of us, the cost of our various indulgences in vices won’t be the loss of our...

Love is a choice. Love is a feeling. Love is an idea. These are just some of the theories on that most vexing of jazz topics and its effect on the men and women who experience it. Questions on love abound, but answers have remained elusive throughout the course of human history, and if you are one such bemused soul then I’m afraid you won’t find what you're looking for in In the Mood for Love, a 2000 romance directed by Wong Kar-wai. In the Mood for Love is famously vague in its narrative and...